Homegrown instant messaging app Hike Messenger, later known as Hike Sticker Chat, has been officially shut down. The company's chief executive officer Kavin Bharti Mittal announced the shutdown of its operations recently. The company will now reportedly focus on its other two apps Vibe and Rush.
"Today we are announcing that we will be sunsetting StickerChat in Jan'21. We thank you all for giving us your trust. We wouldn't be here without you. All your data will be available to download in the app," Mittal tweeted.
Kavin Mittal is the son of India's second largest telco Bharti Airtel's founder and chairman Sunil Mittal. The app has been removed from Play Store and Apple's App Store.
Users can download their data inside the application. However, the announcement does not mean an end to other apps in development by the company.
The end of Hike's messenger service comes at a time when Signal and Telegram have added tens of millions of users in recent weeks.
Launched in December 2012, Hike was once regarded as a competition to global messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Viber. It reportedly had over two million weekly active users at the end of 2019.
Hike has so far raised over $260 million from investors, including Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings, manufacturing firm Foxconn Technology Group and the Bharti group.
1/ We're going to start this new year with a bang @hikeapp!
— Kavin Bharti Mittal (@kavinbm) January 6, 2021
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The focus will now shift to the two new mobile platforms Vibe and Rush. Vibe was first started within the Hike app as HikeLand and later developed into a social media platform and renamed Vibe. This is reportedly an approval-based community app.
Rush, on the other hand, an online competitive gaming platform where users can play against each other in skill-games and win real money. As per the website the platform will be a community of real players only without bots. These include arcade games, skill games and quizzes, among others.