Proprietor Mail.ru’s announcement that the messaging program is being discontinued
When you most likely have not thought of it in years, the primary mainstream common messenger app for the Mac and nearly each different platform will lastly be utterly retired in June 2024.
Twenty-eight years is a very long time for an net-based app to outlive. For a lot of early web adopters, ICQ — “I Search You” — was their introduction to large-scale, real-time social and personal chatting.
Launched in November of 1996, it gave customers a less complicated and extra graphical app so as to chat with associates outdoors of the earlier Web Relay Chat (IRC) system, and an AOL messenger that was nonetheless constrained to the eponymous service.
Extra on AOL in a bit, although.
ICQ functions have been initially accessible for customers on Home windows, Linux, and Mac. It rapidly unfold to different platforms just like the Palm Pilot and early smartphones when these got here alongside.
The software program was fully free to obtain and use, and remained ad-free till 2003.
The Rise and Fall of ICQ
The recognition of this system triggered the nascent America On-line service to purchase it in 1998 for a complete of $407 million. This allowed AOL to accumulate the patents for the expertise, and use it to develop its personal AOL Prompt Messenger program.
iChat (now Messages) was impressed by ICQ and its opponents.
AOL shut down its Prompt Messanger app as a standalone service in 2017.
At its peak, ICQ had round 100 million lively customers. It was later outmoded by AOL IM, MSN Messenger, Google Discuss and different chat apps.
In its heyday, the service was so in style that the unique model of Messages for the Mac in 2002, recognized then as iChat, would enable ICQ’s Person Identification Quantity (UIN) so as to add AOL Prompt Messenger compatibility.
In 2010, the expertise was offered to Digital Sky Applied sciences, which later modified its title to Mail.ru. The Russia-based firm has continued to maintain ICQ going, primarily as a smartphone app.
Its core person base is now round 11 million lively customers, principally based mostly in Russia.
In 2020, Mail.ru introduced a brand new model, which they dubbed “ICQ New” in an effort to draw new customers. As its recognition waned, this system began for use extra for unlawful file sharing, due to the corporate’s lack of moderation and computerized filters.
On Could twenty fourth, 2024, Mail.ru introduced that it could be shutting down the ICQ service and web site as of June twenty sixth, 2024. The corporate has really helpful its customers change to its different chat app, VK Messenger.
That mght be arduous for many of AppleInsider‘s reader base, although. The corporate is obstructing most US. Canadian, and UK addresses.