What you need to know
- TikTok was recently banned in India.
- Indian video app Roposo is booming as a result.
- Roposo says it's peaking a half a million new users every hour.
Following a government ban on TikTok in India, a new video platform is taking the country by storm, adding millions of new users a day.
According to Bloomberg:
In late June, when India banned 59 Chinese apps, including global sensation TikTok, the short-video platform stopped working for its 200 million local users. Within hours, an avalanche of new sign-ups pushed the servers of one of its Bangalore-based rivals, Roposo, to breaking point. Two weeks on, Roposo, which also offers short videos, says it's peaking at 500,000 new users an hour and expects to have 100 million by month's end. That's almost double the 55 million it had before the ban, and puts Roposo among a profusion of Indian startups to benefit from TikTok's troubles in the country.
Here's why India is banning TikTok, UC Browser, WeChat, and other Chinese apps
The report highlights how the app features videos set to Bollywood music, featuring humor "minus the ribaldry, pranks, fashion and even jokes about the coronavirus pandemic." Founder of Roposo's parent company Naveen Tewari reportedly said that it was an app you wouldn't be embarrassed to show your Mom.
A couple of weeks ago, Roposo announced it planned to hire as many as 10,000 people over the next two years, and plans to take its app global. Roposo CEO Mayank Bhangadia recently told Business Insider the company was confident of crossing 100M downloads soon, and that it plans to launch internationally in the coming months.
A Gartner analyst said that the coronavirus pandemic and the app ban in the country presented a "never-before, never again opportunity" to app developers in India.
