Rumor: Twitter canceled its own chat app and fired developers

Twitter spent a year working on a standalone chat app for its service, but canceled the application before release and fired the developers. Buzzfeed claims that based on conversations with former employees of the company.

The app should have used Twitter’s service to let users send each other DMs. In addition, Twitter wanted to approach well-known influential Twitter users to form groups with people interested in a particular topic. Then tweets should have appeared in that group on that subject, Buzzfeed writes.

After a year of development in an office in India, Twitter suddenly stopped working on the project and fired the 20 employees who were working on it. That happened in September, according to the site that spoke with various current and former employees of Twitter.

In addition to the chat service, the Indian office also briefly worked on a ‘Twitter Lite’ app that should have made the service more popular in developing countries. Facebook has had a Lite version of its service for several years now. It is smaller when installed and consumes less data, which should make it more usable on slow mobile networks and without access to Wi-Fi.

Twitter has declined to comment on the story. The rumor that the social network wants to develop a chat app has been going on for years.