Chingari: TikTok’s Indian alternative app reaps 2.5 million downloads

Soon as the government banned 59 Chinese apps including popular app TikTok over the India-China border tensions, several Indians are looking for various alternative apps to continue with their video making routine.  A lot of Indian apps have emerged and started to attract users to satisfy and provide an alternative to TikTok.

Amid this, a new social app called Chingari which is an Indian version of the Chinese app TikTok has been garnering more than 1 lakh downloads and more than 2 million downloads per hour. The makers, however, claim that they are unique unlike other developers who are trying to dupe the users by the name of 'boycotting Chinese products'.

Indian Express quoted co-founder and Chief of Product and Growth, Sumit Ghosh as saying, “Unlike its competitors in the Google Play Store that are just cheap copies of a 50 USD script available on Envato and that are only getting some traction due to the ‘boycott Chinese’ sentiment in the country, Chingari has been engineered and developed for over 2 years with regular feedback from the users.”

Expressing his contentment with the government decision to ban Chinese apps, he added,"For a very long time, TikTok has been spying on users and sending back the data to China. We are happy that this step has finally been taken",

The app has surpassed the mark of 2.5 million downloads as users have downloaded the Indian app more than 3 million times. The app has been developed by Biswatma Nayak and Siddharth Gautam who are programmers based in Bengaluru and according to the Google Play page, the app was released in November 2018. Last year, the app was listed at the top of the Google Play Store page and trending even giving tough competition to the Mitro app which is TikTok clone.

Nayak stated, “Since the word spread that Indians now have a homegrown and more entertaining alternative to TikTok, we have been recording traffic beyond expectations on our app."

“As Chingari is setting new benchmarks, a lot of investors are showing interest in our app. We are holding crucial discussions to get a good investor(s) on board so as to scale up our free-of-cost social platform," Nayak was quoted in a statement.

WHAT IS CHINGARI

Available for both iOS and Android, Chingari has the options for uploading and downloading content, chatting with friends, contacting new people, sharing videos and other content and also scrolling through the newsfeed.

Chingari's video content and options look similar to TikTok, VMate and others but obviously with limited functions.

The app allows users to try out innovative features through WhatsApp status, audio files, video files, Gif stickers, pictures and other content. Some games and quizzes have also been added to the app which is known as the ‘Game Zone’ where the users can earn quick Paytm cash or earn points.

The app will enable the user to choose a language from amongst Hindi, English, Bangla, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Punjabi.

Chingari pays the content creators on the basis of how viral and popular the video gets where the creator gets points per view for every uploaded video which he or she can redeem later on.