The Indian Government banned 59 Chinese apps a few days back and TikTok was one of the 59 banned apps. The thing is that TikTok was a very popular app here in India with millions of active users. Interestingly, the Chingari app which is a TikTok like the app just crossed 10 million downloads which is a dramatic increase as the app had just 100,000 downloads until 10 June.
The major reason for this is obviously the TikTok ban. The majority of the people are stuck at their homes and want to do something to keep themselves busy, now since TikTok is banned and there are the nation’s sentiments to support the Indian origin apps is in play, this whole huge spike in the download is observed.
The co-founder for the app and chief of product Sumit Ghosh said that, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.
Chingari App
Chingari app is a short videos platform pretty much like TikTok but it also has a news and games section in the app. The app is developed by the Bengaluru-based team lead by Biswatma Nayak and Sumit Ghosh.
Sumit Ghosh told The Print that the app Chingari saw downloads go from 3 lakh per hour to 6 lakh per hour between 5 pm and 9 pm on June 30. June 30 was the day after the Indian Government announced the ban and TikTok was completely banned for existing users at 5 pm that same day.
“Not even Facebook’s mobile app and Mark Zukerberg would have had 6 lakh downloads per hour in its best of times,” added Ghosh.
Ghosh said that they saw the spike in the downloads before the ban from June 10 when Boycott China campaign started heating and then Anand Mahindra also tweeted on 28 June, “I hadn’t ever downloaded TikTok but I have just downloaded Chingari… More Power to you…”.
Ghosh will be looking for some investors for the app soon. “No Chinese capital. It’s mostly going to be Indian, and some US capital. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” Ghosh said.
The only problem is that the founders weren’t ready for such a spike and that is why Ghosh tweeted, “Het Bharat! We managed to crash our servers again, guys pls be patient… working hard for the last 48 hours, sleeping less than 2 hours, making sure we could scale up all parts of our infra fast.”
Gosh and Chingari are just preparing themselves for the new journey. Engineers from both Chingari and Amazon Web Services worked to get the servers on track and handle the traffic spike. “This will be my job for the next 10 years,” Ghosh said.
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