Patanjali Claims Kimbho App Was Taken Down After Massive Response
There has been a lot of controversy around the ‘Kimbho’ messaging app from Patanjali, which emerged as a competitor to WhatsApp earlier this week.
The claimed Patanjali
app turned out to be copy of another messaging app developer by a US-based startup
that also developed Kimbho.
And it isn’t on the Apple
App Store
and Google Play Store anymore.
A Patanjali spokesperson has been quoted saying
that the app, claimed to be a security disaster by a security researcher, has
been taken down after getting massive attention with over 160,000 app downloads on
the Google Play Store.
Apparently, the app has been
released in the beta version
,
and
is slated to be officially
launched on 21 June. The spokesperson also said that the
idea behind the Kimbho app is
to protect the private information of users in
India.
*The
app is in testing mode and has been made available on Google Playstore
for trials. Our idea of launching the app is not driven by plans to generate
revenues. The only goal is to protect the country’s private information.*
Acharya Balkrishna, Managing Director, Patanjali
He has been quoted as saying this
in a report by the print. The
report also quotes the developer of the Kimbho app,
Aditi Kamal, who is the founder of the company
called Appdios.
She completed her M.Sc
in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
After
working in the US
for over a decade, I wanted to design an application
for my country. I decided to come back and approached
seniors at Patanjali with
the idea
of developing the home-grown chat platform.
Aditi kamal,founder,appdios.
Talking about the origin of the
app, Kamal says that she reached out to the Patanjali
team, who immediately approved the idea and asked to design an app layered
around encryption, keeping it safe from data leaks.
Speaking about the concept behind Kimbho,
Balkrishna
said: “To ensure the privacy of Indian consumers, we are launching a swadeshi
alternative of WhatsApp.” He
further assured that no data from the user is saved on their server or cloud.
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