ICQ Is Shutting Down from June 26 Onwards

ICQ, the preferred 90s immediate messaging app will close down from June 26.

The cell apps were delisted from the app retail outlets.

VK, ICQ house owners, at the moment are focusing extra at the VK Messaging app.

You most likely take note the times when the Web was once nonetheless a scarce commodity and also you used the preferred ICQ app to be in contact together with your friends and family.

Unfortunately, ICQ is now shutting down. VK, the Russian corporate that owns ICQ, posted a message on Friday that merely reads “ICQ will stop working from June 26”.

ICQ was once all of the rage all through the past due 90s and early 2000s. The app turned into so well-liked that it hit the 100 million user mark in 2001, simply inside 4 years of its release.

This explosive expansion was once attributed to strong phrase of mouth and viral advertising and marketing. It was once additionally a number of the first Web immediate messaging device, which introduced a brand new communique channel to the hundreds.

ICQ customers would get a singular quantity, which they may use for real-time chats. It is advisable to even textual content folks in the event that they had been offline, which was once very unusual at the moment.

Expanding Festival

ICQ was once began in 1996 by way of Mirabilis, an Israeli corporate. It was once purchased by way of AOL in 1998 after which offered to Virtual Sky Applied sciences, the father or mother corporate of VK, in 2010.

The apps were delisted from the app retail outlets a minimum of since July 2023.

Speedy ahead to 2024, ICQ has misplaced its preliminary allure to fashionable festival like WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, and different immediate messaging apps. At a time when those platforms are transferring in opposition to AI updates, ICQ appears to be miles in the back of them.

VK attempted to stay alongside of the temporarily evolving Web messaging panorama. ICQ did be offering iOS and Android apps, which by no means actually took off. However it kind of feels that VK has in spite of everything deserted ICQ for just right.

VK is now specializing in VK Messenger, Russia’s homegrown immediate messaging app. In reality, the ICQ shutdown message redirects customers to the VK Messenger and VK WorkSpace apps.

On the other hand, the respectable ICQ X maintain has posted a cryptic GIF, which says “I’ll be again’. Whether or not it is a trace of a comeback, most effective time will inform.

‘In its heyday/90s, ICQ supported over 2M simultaneous users – that’s a fantastic feat of engineering! Kudos to everybody who constructed and ran that platform.’ – ICQ Consumer

Customers expressed unhappiness seeing ICQ retire, with a lot of them asking for the app to not go away.

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