Google to Close Indian Q&A App ‘Neighbourly’

Google is to shut down its hyperlocal Q&A social app Neighbourly, that was launched in Mumbai just under two years ago. 

The app, developed by company’s Next Billion Initiative, aimed to give local communities an outlet to seek answers to practical questions about their life, routines and more.

At the time of the app’s launch, Google said that it believed that an increase in urban migration, short-term leasing and busy lives had changed the dynamic of local communities, and made it harder to share information quite so easily.

The app supported voice-based entry for questions and a range of local languages.

A Google spokesperson explained to TechCrunch: “We launched Neighbourly as a beta product in Mumbai, India in May, 2018. We set out to build a helpful neighbourhood app that would let neighbours help each other find answers to everyday questions about their neighbourhoods.

“This was in line with Google’s mission to organise the world’s information and make it available to users everywhere, but the product hasn’t grown like we had hoped.”

Neighbourly has suffered low user interactions in the recent past, with many website intelligence sites not having any significant data.

On Sensor Tower, Neighbourly is listed to have more than 10 million downloads, but was downloaded less than 5000 times in February 2020.

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