Earlier this week I received the following email from imo.im:

It’s amazing what $19 billion can do. For years imo.im has supported third party chat clients but within a couple of weeks of the WhatsApp acquisition they’ve abandoned that support to focus on their own network and become the next WhatsApp. For a while now they’ve been building features to support this move - videos in August, stickers in January - and I wonder what would have happened if they focused on their platform earlier. Now they’re just playing catch up to WhatsApp, Kik, Line, and countless others. Timing is critical and I suspect it’s too late for imo.im to be entering the first party messaging fray.