New Delhi: An IIT graduate’s “swadeshi” answer to TikTok, the Chinese social media platform for video content, is making big waves, notching 50 lakh downloads within a month of launch.
MitronTV looks and feels like TikTok, and offers users a similar platform for short videos. Its launch is aimed at challenging foreign domination in the Indian social media sphere, and ensuring citizens’ data stays within the country, the app’s founder told ThePrint.
“I don’t prefer apps not rooted in India. The data of Indians should be in India,” said the app’s Bengaluru-based founder, an IIT-Roorkee graduate who chose to stay unidentified because the app is a side project they launched while working at a multinational company.
“If an app is not made in India then you don’t know where the data goes when it (the data) crosses borders,” the founder added.
According to the founder, MitronTV was built over 3-4 months. Its team currently includes three people, all of whom are juggling the app with their full-time jobs. The founder said the app’s success has caught them by surprise.
“We had long-term plans for this app and wanted to grow slow and steady, but, thanks to the people of India, I guess we don’t have that option now,” the founder said.
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TikTok in India
MitronTV’s launch comes as TikTok, a product of the Chinese company ByteDance, tries to balance its popularity with various controversies.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor alleged last year in the Lok Sabha that TikTok shares user data with the Chinese government, and the concern has also been raised by other parliamentarians. TikTok has refuted the charge and said its Indian user data is stored in Singapore and the US.
However, TikTok seems to have taken cognisance of the concerns and is reportedly in the process of setting up data storage in India.
This month, the social media giant has also found itself at the receiving end of a targeted campaign by infuriated subscribers of a YouTube content creator amid a battle between the users of the two platforms.
The battle was triggered by YouTube’s decision to remove a video by influencer CarryMinati where he purportedly used offensive language against TikTok counterpart Amir Siddiqui. The video had followed Siddiqui’s allegations that YouTube influencers plagiarised TikTok content, which in turn came after a YouTube user, Elvish Yadav, “roasted” TikTok influencers in a video.
The great internet battle led netizens to bombard the Google Play store with as many 40 lakh, mostly negative, reviews of TikTok. The campaign caused TikTok’s rating, as reflected on the app store, to fall from 4.5 stars (highest is 5 stars) to 1.3, before Google stepped in to undo the damage.
There have also been concerns about TikTok’s use to peddle pornographic content, which also led to a brief ban last year, and videos of animal cruelty posted on the platform.
But TikTok seems to be thriving in India, where it has 20 crore users and remains among the most-downloaded apps.
Its downloads were not even impacted by the concerted campaign that followed the YouTube-TikTok battle among netizens, which involved a hashtag movement to call for a ban on the app, and popular YouTubers making videos that showed them uninstalling TikTok on multiple phones.
Estimates from Sensor Tower, which prepares insights into the app industry, show TikTok was downloaded 59 lakh times between 8 May and 15 May in India (considering both Google Play and Apple app store downloads).
Between 16 May and 23 May, when the campaign against TikTok was at its peak, the number of downloads was recorded at 59.4 lakh.
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‘The Jio effect’
MitronTV has inarguably had a promising start. According to a screenshot shared by verified Twitter user @deepakabbot, a Gurgaon-based analyst, MitronTV briefly surpassed TikTok in the Google Play store app rankings on 20 May.
IIT Roorkee student has quietly released a Tiktok clone called “Mitron TV” a month back and it has not only achieved 5mn installs, it is now no.2 android app in India thus raking in half a million installs per day. Name of the app is the growth hack here IMO pic.twitter.com/z24YtNOwJr
— deepakabbot (@deepakabbot) May 25, 2020
According to figures presented by the MitronTV founder, the app currently has 35 lakh to 40 lakh active users. Thanks to the “Jio effect”, the founder said, the majority of the users appear to be from tier 2 and tier 3 areas, which are also said to have fuelled TikTok’s popularity.
The “Jio effect” is a phrase that has gained currency to describe the expansion in internet use across India on the back of cheap data (initially free) provided by telecom firm Reliance Jio.
The founder said the team did not spend any money on marketing the app to gain users, attributing its quick success to “word of mouth”.
However, the app, with an interface that is hard to distinguish from that of TikTok, may constitute a copyright infringement, say experts.
When ThePrint approached Supreme court advocate and cyber law expert Pavan Duggal with screenshots from the two apps to assess the copyright situation, he said it “is possible for the older app, TikTok, to challenge the newer app, MitronTV”.
“However TikTok will have to show that the newer app MitronTV is exactly copying its features, architecture, and user interface characteristics,” he added.
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