What should be our expectations from a Swadeshi Messaging App like “Bolo”?

Sameer Kumar

Software engineer at HCL technologies | Posted on 14-Jul-2018

Baba Ramdeva claimed to to have launched a messaging app which would rival the global messaging giants like “whatsapp” and “wechat”, but we all know that it was a huge failure. It promised a lot of good things but the net result was its sudden disappearance from google playstore in just one day. With this event questions were arose about the necessity of a “swadeshi messaging app” the dream of which Patanjali showed us, but could not fulfill.

A lot of things were expected from the app which was called “Kimbho”, meaning “What’s new” or “how are you” in Sanskrit. Some were:

• It ensured us with more privacy than facebook, and less fake news than whatsapp.

• It was to be in control of Indian companies and would have been a positive step towards “make in india” campaign.

• With all this, it was expected to be more trusted than the foreign messaging apps.

All these expectations however were shattered. According to the news reports, it was subjected to even poorer privacy standards. And now a new app has come up to challenge “whatsapp” which is called “Bolo”. Founded by Aditi Kamal, this app is available on Google playstore and claims to have better features and tighter privacy securing mechanism. “As you can see in the image, the Bolo app claims to offer private and secure messaging, group voice and video calls are also supported. Apparently, you can even Doodle on the app”, is what the latest news tells.

Keeping all this in mind, the previous failure and the new launch, it is difficult to settle on whether an Indian messaging app can give a tough competition to its foreign counterpart o not.