Chingari, India's Alternative To TikTok, Registers Over 3 Lakh Downloads Per Hour

After the government banned 59 Chinese apps including TikTok on Monday (29 June), home-grown Chingari app which is being touted as an alternative to the Chinese short-video sharing platform has been seeing a tremendous growth in the number of users, with around 3-4 lakh downloads being recorded per hour.

In an interview with CNN-News18 on Tuesday (30 June), Chingari co-founder Sumit Ghosh revealed that the app has been "registering 3-4 lakh downloads every hour" after the ban on Chinese apps.

"We are growing at a breakneck speed right now," Ghosh said.

Supporting the government's decision to ban the Chinese apps, Ghosh said that these Chinese apps were gathering the data of Indian users and sending it back to servers in China without their authorisation. He added that these apps violated the privacy rights of the users by sending their data to Chinese servers without their knowledge.

He said that India has enought tech talent as well as tecnological and intellectual capability to build a TikTok competitor in the coming months.

Chingari has so far witnessed over 35 Lakh downloads, according to the app's official Twitter handle.

The app has been developed by Sumit Ghosh, Biswatma Nayak, and Siddharth Gautam, mobile application developers from Chattisgarh, Odisha, and Karnataka respectively.

Chingari has features like trending news, entertainment news, funny videos, video songs, wishes, love quotes, status videos for WhatsApp etc. and over 10,000 creators are making entertaining content using this platform everyday.