Google to shut Neighbourly app on May 12

Search engine giant Google has sent its app Neighbourly to the Google graveyard, two years after it aimed to make it a hit with the Indian neighbourhoods. 

The Mountain View, California based company has announced through the Neighbourly support page that it will close down the q&a application, still in its beta stage, on May 12.

The app, launched in May 2018, aimed to help neighbours know more about their communities, share information and seek answers on various topics

Neighbourly was a part of Google’s next billion users initiative, which focused on providing applications that would help Google’s next potential users. 

At the time of the app’s launch in Mumbai, Ceaser Sengupta, vice president of product management said that the platform would help connect urban migrant users. 

For example, the app let people living in a community get information about local film festivals or hobby clubs. 

"In cities across India, it’s getting harder to get good answers to these questions because cities keep changing, including the people who live there,” he had said. 

The app utilised Google’s voice recognition technology to allow users to talk with their neighbours in English and eight other Indic languages.

“The app hasn't grown like we had hoped,” Google said in its support page for Neighborly.

“In these difficult times, we believe that we can help more people by focusing on other Google apps that are already serving millions of people everyday,” the page added.

Google urged its users to explore the Google Maps Local Guide, which also works in a similar manner by an exchange of knowledge between local communities. Neighbourly had garnered over 10 million downloads on Google Playstore.

Read: Google offers advanced features, tools to tackle Covid-19 crisis 

It requested all of its users who wanted a copy of the data at Neighbourly to download the information from Google Takeout, an app that allows users to export app-specific data to a downloadable archive file.