Developed by Chinese multimedia giant Tencent, QQ is one of the world's largest instant messaging (IM) platforms with over 800 million monthly active users. In 2014, it won the Guinness World Record for the largest number of simultaneous online users on an IM platform, with 210,212,085 users online at the same time.
Last March, when Microsoft announced that Windows 10 would launch in summer 2015, it also declared that Tencent would "create a Windows 10 universal app for their flagship QQ app". However, as ZDNet reports, Tencent has now abandoned those plans, due to falling interest in Microsoft's mobile OS, which it says the company isn't doing enough to address.
Microsoft touted its Tencent collaboration - including a QQ Windows 10 app - last year
Tencent already offers an app for Windows Phone, and it will continue to be available, but the company says that the app will no longer get any significant updates, and will now enter a maintenance-only phase of development.
It explained that the number of "users on the Windows Phone platform keeps declining and [many] have moved to other platforms, but [we] didn't notice that Microsoft is showing any effort to retain them."
Those comments follow Microsoft's decision to dramatically scale back its own smartphone range, amid recent reports that its next Lumia handset could be its last, as the company is said to be focusing its mobile development efforts on a new high-end 'Surface phone', expected later this year. Meanwhile, Microsoft has repeatedly delayed the rollout of Windows 10 Mobile to existing handsets in recent weeks.
Nonetheless, Tencent added: "We believe that Windows 10 Mobile is a good platform which is yet [to be] a hit to the market". Indeed, the company appears to believe that Microsoft's mobile OS could yet see some growth in the future, but as things currently stand, it's not prepared to invest further resources until it sees some positive movement.
It said that "despite that the era of Windows 10 Mobile is coming, we may not follow closely [at] this time. It is not because we are changing, but the reality is cruel, which drives us to change and adapt to the times."
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