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Tencent drops Windows 10 Mobile QQ development

Chinese technology giant Tencent confirmed it has dropped plans to develop an app for popular chatting tool QQ on the Windows 10 Mobile platform, citing 'the cruel reality' of the decline in users of the platform.
Written by Cyrus Lee, Contributor

Tencent has announced that it will halt the development of a QQ app for the upcoming Windows 10 Mobile platform.

In an online announcement on Wednesday, the company said that "despite that the era of Windows 10 Mobile is coming, we may not follow closely this time. It is not because we are changing, but the reality is cruel, which drives us to change and adapt to the times". It claimed that it has been a true supporter of previous Windows mobile platforms between 2011 and 2016.

"Users on the Windows Phone platform keeps declining and have moved to other platforms, but [we] didn't notice that Microsoft is showing any effort to retain them," said Tencent. "But we believe that Windows 10 Mobile is a good platform which is yet a hit to the market."

Tencent said its QQ app will continue to support the current Windows Mobile platform, but the company will not make major updates and will enter routine maintenance.

QQ's official download page shows that the latest version of mobile QQ for Windows Phone platform was made on June 12, 2015, while its iOS version and Android version were both refreshed this January, indicating that the plan to ditch the unpopular platform might have been long-planned.

Despite more and more Chinese people migrating to mobile-friendly WeChat, QQ remains one of the most popular messaging tools in China, both on desktop and mobile terminals.

As of September 30, 2015, QQ's monthly active users reached 860 million, 639 million of whom use mobile terminals to log on to their QQ accounts, according to the company's third-quarter financial report in November.

An earlier report indicates that Android and iOS own a market share of smartphones in China, of 78.1 percent and 19.4 percent respectively as of August 2015, compared with Windows' tepid 2.3 percent.

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