Paytm Inbox, an in-app chat feature introduced by the payments major has been pulled out after a year of debut. As per the company, the feature had wide user base as it enabled over 100 million users to chat besides sending/requesting money and performing many payments related use cases.
Almost a month and half ago, Paytm had introduced another feature on its app called ‘SMS Inbox’ that essentially integrates users SMS box with Paytm or its becoming the default SMS app.
Earlier, Paytm did not disclose the removal of its in-app chat feature from Inbox, however, the company’s CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma via twitter mentioned that the chat feature inside Inbox has been withdrawn.
“We took off chat from Paytm App after it became pretty popular but code base wasn’t going to scale without ton of cost”, said Sharma in a thread on the microblogging site.
While trying out Inbox feature inside the native app, we found that Paytm Inbox is still there but its primary use case – instant messaging feature is no longer available. Instead of chatting in real time (that Paytm aspired for with Inbox), a user can now only intimate receiver/borrower with a remark while completing the transaction.
Of late, Paytm Inbox has been integrating new features such as news, TV, and gaming to make the experience full stack. At some point in June 2018 (precisely, within 7 months), the company had claimed that Paytm Inbox has around 120 million MAUs.
The development comes as surprise primarily to media, analysts and ultimately users as Inbox once positioned as at par with rivals Google and WhatsApp UPI centric payments apps.
Since pivot, SMS Inbox feature also triggered wrath amongst users as it becomes a default app and can read all SMS including personal as well as financial details.
Touted itself as spam-proof, SMS Inbox claims to proprietary machine learning algorithms to classify SMS into personal, transactional & promotional categories. This is quite similar to Microsoft’s SMS Organiser and Truecaller’s Truemessenger SMS app that had gained popularity without any significant use case.
Source: Entrackr
To Read Our Daily News Updates, Please visit Inventiva or Subscribe Our Newsletter & Push.
