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After years of speculation<\/a>, it appears that Twitter did actually develop a messaging app of its own. But, two caveats, it was intended for emerging markets and it was\u00a0killed off before ever being released to the masses.<\/p>\n That\u2019s according to a report from BuzzFeed<\/a>, which claims the app was developed by Twitter\u2019s emerging markets team in India, shortly before\u00a0Twitter laid off most of its engineers in the country<\/a> in September.<\/p>\n We contacted Twitter for comment earlier today during\u00a0Asian business hours but the company has not\u00a0responded at the time of writing.<\/p>\n The report says that Twitter acknowledged that it has a growth issue in emerging markets like India, where the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger continue to grow at speed, so it hatched a plan to develop a chat app based around topics and content gleaned from the main Twitter service.<\/p>\n BuzzFeed explains more:<\/p>\n Sources familiar with the messaging app\u2019s development told BuzzFeed News that Twitter intended to identify \u201cinfluencers\u201d around certain topics\u200a \u2014\u200a let\u2019s say news or politics or sports\u200a \u2014\u200a and encourage them to create groups of interest within the app.<\/p>\n Not only could users chat among themselves in these groups, they could also subscribe them to relevant Twitter accounts whose tweets would be pulled in automatically into these groups \u2014 functionality that\u2019s similar to what\u2019s already possible in Slack channels.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The idea seems to be to gently introduce new users to the kinds of content that exists on Twitter, with the aim of sparking their interest in using the main service.<\/p>\n There was a time that a Twitter messaging app could have been\u00a0compelling, but this particular vision seems problematic. Messaging is popular because it is simple, this Twitter app sounds rather complicated just on paper. ,Perhaps it isn\u2019t a huge surprise that Twitter killed it off following less than impressive feedback from close trials it conducted among students in India.<\/p>\n BuzzFeed\u2019s sources also claim that the Twitter India engineering team worked on a \u2018Lite\u2019 version of the main app for emerging markets. That\u2019s similar to lightweight apps developed by Facebook among others, but Twitter Lite has apparently disappeared without trace.<\/p>\n\n