Recently the Indian Government banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps for privacy concerns regarding their connection to the Government of China and also because of the recent clashes in the Ladakh valley but that aside now we have a big void in this particular market, India is a Sucker for entertainment apps like TikTok but at the same time the content quality of these apps are very poor to be honest but some of them are good to be fair for example the dance videos but most of them are low quality plagiarism of songs and poor acting by individuals with cheap content.
But with this Ban many new made in India apps have gain momentum and has been downloaded in Millions , some of the apps which have come to the spotlight are Mitron, Chingari, Roposo and ShareChat. I have never heard of these apps even 3 months ago but I thought as a Filmmaker to give it a try and find out if it’s better than TikTok and most importantly is it good for Filmmakers because to be honest TikTok wasn’t a Platform which had a lot of Filmmaker generated content and is mostly ignored by this Community . But I personally feel these types of apps have a lot of potential just that it has been extensively used by Teens to Generate Mostly low-quality Content .
So I have tried and tested 3 apps which are Chingari, Roposo and Sharechat, You Guys must be thinking why not Mitron, the reason is Mitron I don’t have confirmation that if it is actually Indian or not, some say it might be Pakistani but bought by an Indian later, whatever I still didn’t try maybe later will try it out if it gains popularity.
So here is my experience with the Made in India TikTok Alternative Apps :-
1. Chingari – This App which recently got viral just after the TikTok Ban, the founders said that they were getting more than 100K Downloads every hour which is actually insane and that’s good news for them but I hate to break it to you all that this app is very crappy and lags a lot, the Interface was very confusing initially and didn’t even load properly but later with an update it got better. The App offers TikTok like Video Sharing and a News Section with links to different sites. This App seems more like a College Community Project rather than an actual competitor, it has a very bad user interface but considering this app is very new I will give it an another chance as it will have funding considering its explosive growth and might get better in future. But for now, it is a bad experience.
2. ShareChat – This App resembles Facebook and Instagram more than TikTok but the thing I like about this App is that this app has only Regional Languages and no English at all, so it stands out because of this unique trait, usually it is very tough to beat social media giants like Facebook. But because it only has regional languages, so people from rural India will be more active on this platform than others as many of them don’t even know any other languages except their mother tongue, exposing you to a whole new set of audience. The interface of this app is exceptionally smooth, and I like how fast it is and the UI is not confusing at all unlike Chingari. You can post Pictures, Audio and Videos. It also has Chatroom but I did not like it much. Overall, it is a Good App for content creators and can be useful.
3. Roposo – Out of all three of them this Roposo app has the most matured user interface and is smooth and more fun to use than the other two mentioned above . This App has come closest to resemble TikTok and has a lot of features for Video Editing with great funky effects and large selection of music, much better than Chingari and Sharechat. I enjoyed using this app and think this might be the best till now to replace TikTok.
But the question we all filmmakers must be asking that is it worth joining these platforms and are there any better good quality content than TikTok on these platforms. To be honest we are losing a lot of opportunity here and right now if we join, we can have the first mover advantage. The thing is that bad content creators are a hit on these types of platforms because good content creators ignore it and they take away the sweet piece of opportunity. So at least try it out, we filmmakers and other good content creators have nothing to lose.
Cheers !
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