Nimbuzz, which has become a major mobile messaging application for emerging markets like India, is making a more aggressive moves into smartphone platforms. Today it announces the release of its app for Windows Phone 8. This will take advantage of the platform’s Live Tiles and locked home screen notifications, although in fairness it’s biggest growth platform remains Android and its core base of feature phones. Existing Nimbuzz users on Windows Phone 7.5 users can simply upgrade. The Nimbuzz platform has 150 million users spread across 200 countries.
Recently Nimbuzz, which competes with Viber, Skype, WhatsApp, Saya.im and GroupMe, passed 150 million users globally, and says it is doubling its users year on year and is strongest in Asia, mainly India and Saudi Arabia. It’s investors include Mangrove and Naspers.
With the new release, Nimbuzz now supports Windows Phone 8 resizable Live Tiles which are customisable. Along with the increased native language support of the Windows Phone OS, the WP 8 version of Nimbuzz is available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi and Arabic.
Vikas Saxena, Nimbuzz CEO says its important to be on Windows Phone as its target market starts to upgrade from feature phones to smart phones. It’s interesting to see Nokia also push this app, given that a lot of its existing growth has come from emerging markets.
Nimbuzz is available on iOS, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Phone & J2ME as well as Windows and Mac desktop computers.
A spokesperson said recent competition from Facebook in the messaging and VOIP space would not affect Nimbuzz as the whole space is expanding.