Samsung axes heavily-promoted ‘ChatON’ mobile-messaging chat service

“Samsung Electronics Co. said Friday that it would discontinue a mobile-messaging chat service that it had promoted heavily in recent years, the latest sign of the South Korean technology giant’s struggles to gain traction building the software and services that run on its best-selling smartphones,” Jonathan Cheng reports for The Wall Street Journal.

“Samsung said in a statement it would end support for the service, called ChatON, in the first quarter next year to focus on services in ‘health, mobile commerce and other platforms,'” Cheng reports. “The service will formally shut down on Feb. 1, except in the U.S., where it will be wound down some time before the end of March.”

“The app was available in 67 languages, from Slovak to Malay, in 237 countries. Samsung recently boasted a user base of over 200 million users for ChatON, and claimed to be the No. 1 mobile messenger application in the U.S. and France,” Cheng reports. “But those statistics belied a more prosaic reality: the app, while ubiquitous, was hardly ever used by Samsung’s customers… A study earlier this year by market research firm Strategy Analytics showed that the average U.S. user of a Samsung device spent an average of six seconds each month on ChatON compared with the roughly two hours that the average user spent each month on Facebook’s Instagram.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Samsung’s Mimicry Team is now focused on trying (and, as usual, ultimately failing) to knock off Apple Pay – based on their crappy fingerprint reader that doesn’t work worth a shit.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “boecherer” for the heads up.]

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