End of legend: icq stops working

[Tomcat]

ICQ messenger relaunched by the company Mail.ru (later renamed VK) in 2020, will stop working on June 26. This is reported in the official statement of the VK company. The report clarifies that this decision is related to the intention to focus on the development of two key products-VK Messenger and VK WorkSpace.

To strengthen work on new products, ICQ employees will join the development teams of VK Messenger and VK WorkSpace. "The service will be suspended from June 26," the official statement reads.

VK also noted that in the first quarter of 2024, the average monthly audience of VK Messenger users in Russia was 72.9 million people. The company emphasizes that the service is becoming a comprehensive platform that allows you to communicate with friends, consume content in channels and interact with businesses.

ICQ users are encouraged to copy and save data, correspondence, and files to their computers. The ICQ bot's message also contains advice about switching to VK Messenger.

It should be noted that the ICQ app has already disappeared from the AppStore and Google Play stores.

ICQ, first released in 1996 by the Israeli company Mirabilis, was one of the first Internet messengers to gain worldwide popularity. The name ICQ comes from the English phrase "I seek you", reflecting the main purpose of the messenger-finding and communicating with friends and acquaintances. In the people, the messenger received the affectionate nickname "ICQ". In 1998, ICQ was acquired by the American company AOL, and in 2010 — by the Russian company Mail.ru Group (now VK).

At the peak of ICQ's popularity, users struggled to get six-digit numbers that were considered prestigious and indicated their "status" in the online community. Getting a short number was a cherished goal for many, and some even sold their accounts for significant amounts.

Over its long history, ICQ has gone through many changes and updates to adapt to new requirements and technologies. However, with the development of mobile devices and the emergence of new messengers, the popularity of ICQ began to decline. Now, in 2024, the legendary messenger officially ends its work, giving way to new and more modern solutions.

 

[Friend]

Older than many users

The Russian holding VK, formerly known as Mail.ru Group, announced the closure of the messenger "Agent Mail.ru", also known on the Internet as "Mail.ru Agent" and simply "M-Agent". At the time of its appearance in 2003, it was a domestic competitor to ICQ.

Agent Mail.ru existed for 21 years. During this time, it has been released on all popular software platforms - there are proprietary applications for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, and in 2020 a separate build for Linux was released. The developers also thought about the owners of devices on other operating systems - for them, they provided a version of the Mail.ru Agent, which works through a browser.

The replacement is already ready

VK does not plan to leave the messenger market. Unlike Signal, it will continue to compete with foreign Telegram and WhatsApp, which have not yet been blocked in Russia, with the help of the VK Messenger service, and this is official.

The website of Agent Mail.ru openly says that everyone who has used Agent for decades can continue to communicate with friends in VK Messenger. At the same time, nothing is said about the automatic transfer of the history of communication, as well as contacts, in the official statement of VK.

VK Messenger is VK's most modern service for communicating on the Internet. As CNews reported, it was launched in May 2022, and VK also has a regularly updated corporate service VK WorkSpace, which has existed since 2013 and until recently was known as "Mail.ru for business". This is an analogue, for example, of Google Workspace, which includes WorkDisk storage, the WorkMail mail service and the Teams messenger. The latter is designed to replace the American Slack and Microsoft Teams.

VK Holding positions WorkSpace as a replacement for Agent Mail.ru for communicating with colleagues.

Which was to be expected

The closure of the Mail.ru Agent service was, in fact, only a matter of time. In the early summer of 2024, VK destroyed the ICQ messenger, which turned 28 years old - it had been operating since 1996 and was originally Israeli, then became the property of the American holding AOL, and in 2010 it ended up in the hands of Russian businessmen.

Since 2011, Agent Mail.ru has been very closely connected with ICQ – both services were integrated into each other, but at the same time continued to exist separately and developed in parallel. In 2020, when VK updated ICQ in a major way, actually restarting the service, Agent Mail.ru also received a large-scale update. According to data from open sources, both messengers were based on the same code by that time.

By the way, Agent Mail.ru has faced claims about the uniqueness of its code at least twice. For example, in February 2009, representatives of the developer community of the Miranda IM client began to suspect the creators of Agent of plagiarizing their program code. In June 2012, the Russian company Spirit said that the authors of Agent were misleading users by calling the new Mail.ru Agent engine their own development, since it is based on Google products. The developers acknowledged the presence of the "Google footprint", but stressed that they had reworked the code so much that there was little left of the original in it.

That the creatureThe fact that the curtailment of ICQ led to the disabling of the ability to log in to the Agent by phone number was also indicated. This method of authorization appeared in ICQ instead of the previous UIN numbers after the restart of the service in April 2020 and remained after the restart in the spring of 2022.