Koo App : Voice of India in very own Indian languages

Pic Credit : Koo App

Koo , a completely home grow alternative to Twitter gained prominence after the government used it to respond to the original Twitter in a row over free speech.

Just 10% of India speaks English. Almost 1 billion people in India don't know English. Instead they speak one of India's 100s of languages. They are now getting access to smartphones and would love an internet in their language. However, majority of the internet has been in English. Koo is an attempt to make the voice of these Indians heard. They can now participate on the internet in their mother tongue by listening to the views of some of the sharpest Indian minds and also speak their mind by sharing their thoughts.

Koo has been recognized by the Government of India and Honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi as one of the Aatmanirbhar Apps of India.

Koo being available in several Indian languages is one of its selling points. Its tagline is “to connect with Indians in Indian languages”. Koo can be used either on the computer (website) or on the mobile app. It is available on Google and Apple’s app stores and one can sign in using their phone number. Currently, Koo supports English, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi and Telegu. According to their website, support for Bengali, Gujarati, Oriya, Malayalam, Punjabi and Assamese is also in the works. A user can write text up to 400 characters, more than the 280 characters Twitter allows. Koo also supports all multimedia functionaries, including audio and video recording.

The Koo app shot to prominence after Twitter got into a weeks-long standoff with the government over blocking certain content and accounts.

Koo, whose logo of a yellow chick bears a resemblance to Twitter's blue-and-white bird, was founded just a year ago and is a fraction the size of Twitter. It had approximately 2.6 million installs from Indian app stores last year, compared with about 28 million installs for Twitter, according to data from analytics provider Sensor Tower. But from Feb. 6 to Feb. 11, Koo's installs soared by 901,000, according to the firm's mobile insights strategist Stephanie Chan.

Koo was founded in March 2020 by Radhakrishna and Bidawatka, MBA graduates, who had both invested in multiple companies before launching Koo. Radhakrishna had founded TaxiForSure, an aggregator of car rentals and taxis, in 2010. He had sold it to Ola Cabs in 2015. Bidawatka had co-founded Vokal India, an app that operates much the same way that popular question and answer platform, Quora, does. Vokal allows users to communicate in vernacular languages.

With a lot of Politicians and Government organization joining Koo , it is gaining multifold popularity.

We also saw the very Vocal Kangana Ranaut joining Koo with a bio "Desh Bhakt".