ĭuring the second week of January 2021, ICQ saw a renewed increase in popularity in Hong Kong, spurred on by the controversy over WhatsApp's privacy policy update. In 2022, ICQ had about 11 million monthly users. The updated messenger was presented to the general public on April 6, 2020. In 2020, the Mail.Ru Group, which owns ICQ, decided to launch new software, 'ICQ New', based on its messenger. At the time of the Mail.Ru acquisition in 2010, there were around 42 million daily users. Īt its peak around 2001, ICQ had more than 100 million accounts registered.

ICQ became the first widely adopted IM platform. ICQ was among the first stand-alone instant messenger (IM) applications-while real-time chat was not in itself new ( Internet Relay Chat (IRC) being the most common platform at the time), the concept of a fully centralized service with individual user accounts focused on one-on-one conversations set the blueprint for later instant messaging services like AIM, and its influence is seen in modern social media applications. The ICQ client application and service were initially released in November 1996, freely available to download. Originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, the client was bought by AOL in 1998, and then by Mail.Ru Group (now VK) in 2010. The name ICQ derives from the English phrase ' I Seek You'.

ICQ New is a cross-platform instant messaging (IM) and VoIP client. Russian, English, Portuguese, Ukrainian, German, Czech, French, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, Arabic, Vietnamese

IOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, web application, Linux, (former platforms) Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, Java, Symbian OS, Symbian S60, BlackBerry OS, Bada, Amazon Fire, Palm Pilot, iMode C++ ( Linux/ Windows/ MacOS), Objective-C/ Swift ( iOS), Java/ Kotlin ( Android)

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