Who’s building the official Messenger app for WP7? (Not Microsoft!)

Microsoft has been strangely quiet about a Windows Live Messenger app for Windows Phone 7, with no mention early on, and a conspicuous absence in a blog post the other day by Windows Live Corporate VP Chris Jones.  Now today, two days after Windows Phone 7 was officially “launched”, Miyowa, a mobile app development company with “primary offices in Silicon Valley and France”, announced on their blog that “Miyowa – not Microsoft – to provide Windows Live Messenger for Windows Phone 7.  The blog post goes on to describe their relationship with Microsoft:

Here at Miyowa, we’ve had the pleasure of being able to play around on it  (WP7 –ed.) for the past few months, as Microsoft have enlisted Miyowa to create the Windows Live Messenger app for the new OS.

We’ve long been partners with Microsoft, and are their number 1 mobile Windows Live Messenger provider. In fact, it is the success of our mobile WLM app that long ago helped us grow from a company with a couple of people working away in a tiny office, to the multi-national we are today.

Apparently Miyowa might have been chomping at the bit to get the word out, as a tweet showing on their website from Oct. 12th has apparently since been taken down:

miyowa-tweet

here’s the link: http://twitter.com/#!/Miyowa/statuses/2147483647

What’s also interesting is that on September 30th, French site Wikikou.fr posted information saying that another French development company, Bewise, was in charge of development of the “official version” of a Windows Live Messenger app for WP7.  Here are screenshots of the Miyawa app (from their blog post), on the left, and Bewise (via Wikikou.fr), on the right:

ecran_Conversation-176x300      messenger-windows-phone-7-5651

Wikikou.fr quotes Oded Ran, Head of Consumer Marketing, Windows Phone, UK, as saying that there would be an official Messenger app, and the French site went on to reveal that their information was that the app was coming from Bewise.  Bewise has apparently taken down images of their Messenger app from their website.

So what does it all mean?  That there apparently will be a Messenger app at launch, and that it won’t necessarily be built by Microsoft.  We’re not sure we know much more than that.  For the record, there aren’t any Messenger apps showing up on the Windows Phone MarketPlace, at least from the Zune 4.7 PC interface.  We don’t have access to a Windows Phone 7, anyone care to clear this up for us?

(via WMPowerUser.com)