As the anti-China sentiments are at an all-time high, Indian clone of the Chinese apps are recording an upsurge in their userbase. Government announced ban on 59 Chinese apps earlier this week which includes India’s biggest short video making app Tik-Tok. Chingari, Roposo, Public and Mitron are a few Indian social and short video apps trying to replace Tik Tok in the market and are already in top 20 downloaded apps in last few days.
Tik Tok had 200 million registered users and 120 million monthly active users making it one of the biggest social media apps in the country. While InMobi-owned Roposo is witnessing increased traffic on its platform, startups like Chingari, Trell and Mitron are also garnering new users rapidly. The startups are requiring extra server capacity to meet the growing demand.
Bengaluru-based Chingari record over 1 million new users within a span of 24 hours. Sumit Ghosh, cofounder of the platform stated that they are fastest growing platform in the field and he has to pull all-nighters to manage the surge in traffic as their system also crashed this Monday night. “Prior to the ban (of Chinese apps), when we had around 2.5 million users, we had daily active users of around over half a million, and now the same is 1.2-1.5 million,” added Ghosh.
The tension between India and China on borders have led to a major shift in users from the Chinese apps to Indian origin ones like Vokal, Trell and ShareChat. This has also given momentum to Indian startups to fill the supply and demand gap by establish large-scale technology companies.
InMobi founder and CEO Naveen Tewari stated that they are eyeing a userbase of 10 million by the end of July. Roposo claims it has seen a 5x increase in its MAUs to 25 million as of June 29 compared to May. “The quality of the content is of the highest order. India deserves high-quality content. We did not have the growth curves that TikTok was having, but I was sure at some point of time this will get questioned. In the last six weeks, Roposo grew by 8-10 times, ending up with 65 million users. The numbers are changing by the hour,” said Tewari. He added the company is further investing in Roposo infrastructure even though some hiccups may come in 24-48 hours.