Yahoo to discontinue legacy Messenger, to introduce newer and improved version

Yahoo has announced that it would discontinue its legacy Messenger in favour of a newer improved version. By 5 August this year, users can download the newest version if they want to continue using their services.

Yahoo made the announcement in its blog, ''In December of 2015, we announced a brand new Yahoo Messenger for mobile, the Web and in Yahoo Mail on the desktop, built on a new modern platform. This complete revamp brings users an incredibly fast, beautiful and smart way to send – and unsend – messages, photos and animated GIFs in 1:1 and group conversations.''

The Messenger was first launched by Yahoo as Yahoo Pager in 1998 and now, downloads of the older version of messenger would no longer be available after August this year. After August users would not be able to log in or send messages on it or use any third party-clients that used its application programming interface (API), a spokesperson from Yahoo confirmed to VentureBeat.

''We intend to continue our focused efforts on the new Messenger, with a goal of delivering the best experience to our users.'' wrote Yahoo in the blog.

''While today we provide basic interoperation between the legacy product and the new Messenger, we encourage all of our users to complete their transition to the new Yahoo Messenger as we will no longer support the legacy platform as of 5 August 2016. We intend to continue our focused efforts on the new Messenger, with a goal of delivering the best experience to our users,'' said Yahoo chief architect Amotz Maimon in the blog.