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Twitter Built a Messaging App But Never Released It (buzzfeed.com)
Twitter spent more than a year building a stand-alone instant messaging app that never ended up seeing the light of day. The product -- which provided a single interface for tweets and instant messages -- was built by Twitter's Indian engineering team at its office in Bengaluru, reports BuzzFeed News. The company shelved the app when it shut down its engineering center in the country in September, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to BuzzFeed News. The app was envisioned as a tool to ease new users on to Twitter's flagship platform. It did this by allowing users to subscribe to groups based around topics such as news, politics, and sports. The people within the groups could chat among themselves, and subscribe to additional accounts, pulling their tweets into the conversation. This kind of functionality is already available in Slack channels, and was tested in Facebook's now-defunct Rooms app (which itself may be making a comeback, if recent reports are to be believed).
That would explain why they shut the group down. It'd be interesting to know the reasons why but my own experience of supervising a team in India is that culture, language and staff retention are serious problems. Whatever you think you're saving by paying less you could more than lose in terms of productivity and code quality.