As Musk plans to charge for Twitter blue tick, its Indian rival has crossed 50 million downloads

The micro-blogging sphere has long been dominated by Twitter. The acquisition of the platform by the world’s richest man has led to multiple changes being promised in a very short period. In fact, the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk has even announced that he is going to charge verified users a monthly fee of $8 (roughly Rs 650). While all this was going on, Koo, an Indian micro-blogging platform has crossed the threshold of 50 million downloads. 

Koo boasts of being a multi-lingual microblogging platform and has reported a spike in users. The app also reported an increase in time spent, and engagement since January this year. 

To appeal to India’s multi-lingual audience, Koo has launched features like MLK (Multi-Language Kooing), language keyboard, topics in 10 languages, language translations, edit functionality, and free self-verification. 

Aprameya Radhakrishna, CEO & Co-founder, Koo App said, “We're very excited to be crossing the 50 million download mark. This validates the demand for a multi-lingual social network built with an India-first product mindset of seamlessly including language-speaking Indians in daily thoughta sharing. Our rapid growth and adoption is a testimony to the fact that we are solving a problem faced by a billion Indians.”

Currently, Koo is available in 10 languages including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Bengali and English. The company claims that there are over 7500 eminent voices on the platform.

Aprameya added, “There is huge potential for further growth. There are about 80 crore Internet users in the country, majority of whom wish to express themselves in their native language. Their sharing of thoughts is restricted to closed groups and known people and are unable to express freely in the open Internet and be discovered. We are proud of our mission of being inclusive and enabling freedom of expression for 90% of native language-speaking Indians. As we move ahead, we will continue to invest in our technology and continue to build the platform with a user-first mindset to further drive digital independence for native language-speaking users in India and across the world.”