Over the weekend, the Economic Times of India revealed Google’s apparent plans to launch a WhatsApp competitor for India and other emerging markets in 2015. It kinda makes sense – they lost WhatsApp acquisition to Facebook – until you realize, they sort of already have a competitor in Hangouts.
Fine, Hangouts might not be the performance wonder WhatsApp is but, it does have a couple of distinguishing features, a major plus in this saturated market of messaging apps. It’s more a problem of awareness – if more people in emerging markets were aware of what Hangouts is and what it is capable of, perhaps more people would use it.
So why does Google need to build a new messaging app to compete against WhatsApp? I can think of 2 solid reasons why this makes sense for Google.
They want your phone number
They tried so hard to get it through Google+ but that didn’t work out. And Google Hangouts is tied to Google+. But most people on Google+ and Hangouts are only there because they were forced to when they created a Gmail. And no one ever cared to complete their profiles. According to the Economic Times of India, this proposed new messaging app from Google will be unlike any other Google service, in that you will not be required to login with a Google account. Rather it will employ phone number-based authentication like is obtainable of WhatsApp. Bingo.
More reasons to spam you
Strongly tied to the first reason – they need a WhatsApp competitor for the same reason Facebook bought WhatsApp – better access to our most private conversations. I for one don’t have a Facebook account. But I use Google Search, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Apps, Gmail etc. And I use and Android phone too. The story is similar for many internet users; they might not be on the most popular social media platforms but sure as hell use at least on Google service.
No other company is better positioned than Google to leverage a service like WhatsApp to support an ad-supported business model.
The app is reported to launch in 2015, first in India and then to other emerging markets. They are choosing to pull the “India First” trick again for the same obvious reasons they did with Android One and Offline YouTube availability.
Of course, like all things Google for the masses, the messaging app will be free. “Free” should probably be read “Ad-supported”. As if we didn’t already get spammed enough with Google AdSense ads all over the web.
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