Sources: Twitter spent over a year developing a standalone messaging app in India, aimed at on-boarding new users, but killed it in September after trial runs
Twitter spent more than a year developing an instant messaging app for emerging markets but killed the product without launching it, BuzzFeed News has learned.
Context & Ripple Effects
The killed app is the clearest picture yet of how far Twitter was willing to go to solve its India problem: rather than assume the main product would travel, it spent more than a year building a standalone messenger aimed at on-boarding first-time internet users, then shut it down in September after trial runs. The move followed earlier attempts to buy its way into the country, including talks to acquire missed-call marketing startup ZipDial for $30M-$40M.
The competitive backdrop explains why a dedicated product felt necessary — and why it likely failed. WhatsApp was already moving into India's next battleground, testing person-to-person payments with a limited user set ahead of a wider rollout, meaning Twitter would have been entering messaging just as the incumbent added a second lock-in layer.
First-order effects
- Twitter exits September 2016 with nothing launched in India despite over a year of development spend, leaving its new-user onboarding problem unsolved and the work written off internally.
- Indian users who might have been onboarded through a lightweight messenger stay reachable primarily through WhatsApp, whose payments test was already deepening its hold on the same audience.
Second-order effects
- With no Twitter-built alternative in market, local social apps became the counterweight to WhatsApp instead — the gap that Koo later tried to fill before laying off roughly 80% of its staff, and that Twitter itself circled back to in 2021 by exploring a $1.1B purchase of ShareChat plus $900M in committed investment.
- WhatsApp's head start compounded: its payments service moved from a 1M-user pilot in 2018 to regulatory approval for a 20M-user expansion by late 2020, converting messaging dominance into a financial foothold Twitter had abandoned any path to contest.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — build-and-kill attempts followed by acquisition interest years later — Western social platforms structurally cede emerging-market messaging to incumbents and local founders, and re-enter only through M&A at a premium.
- India becomes the proving ground where distribution-first products beat brand-first ones: the platform that owns the default messaging habit can extend into payments and commerce, while entrants without one must buy their audience outright or not arrive at all.
The trend: Global social platforms keep attempting dedicated India plays — built products, then acquisitions — while WhatsApp converts its messaging dominance there into payments and commerce, widening the entry gap each cycle.