Google has decided to shut the Neighbourly app, something it had specifically designed for India as a platform for the users to share hyper local information.
In a mail, it told users: “We wanted to let you know that we will close down the Neighbourly Beta beginning on May 12, 2020.”
The app was to “connect you with your neighbours and make sharing local information more human and helpful. As a community, you’ve come together to celebrate local festivals, shared crucial information during floods, and answered over a million questions. But Neighbourly hasn’t grown like we had hoped,” Google said.
Neighbourly was an offering from the company’s Next Billion Users team and positioned as a source of information. The decision to shut comes less than two years after the app was rolled out in major cities, with plans to take it people in hundreds of districts.
“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. We plan to take the lessons learned from Neighbourly and use them to improve our other products. If you want to keep sharing your local knowledge with your neighbours, we encourage you to become a Google Maps Local Guide,” the mail said.
Users will be able to download their Neighbourly content till Oct 12.
“We want to fill the hyper-local information gap that exists,” a senior executive of Google had said ahead of the Hyderabad launch in November 2018.
Neighbourly sought to make it easy, for the users, to seek advice and recommendations from neighbours who know the area on a range of aspects from eatries, bus routes, pharmacies to mode of transport to reach a location. The app was available in multiple Indian languages, he had said.
