Will they or won’t they? That’s the question that we’ve been asking over the last few weeks as reports initially suggested that Samsung would be shutting down its ChatOn messaging service, then Samsung denied the report. Well now it looks like we’ve finally got our answer.
Samsung has confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that it plans to shut down ChatOn on February 1, save for the U.S., where it’ll stay alive until the end of March. Samsung says that it’s killing ChatOn as a result of the “fast-changing market environment” and that the move will allow it to focus more on health and mobile commerce.
ChatOn originally launched in late 2011, and Samsung recently said that its service had more than 200 million users. However, that number was likely given a healthy boost due to the fact that ChatOn would come preloaded on Samsung’s smartphones, which are some of the best-selling in the mobile space. With more popular competitors like Facebook Messenger, Whats App, and Line, and no indication of major growth in sight, it’s no surprise that ChatOn is going away.