India started promoting the need to be self-reliant aka Atmanirbhar Bharat last year. Several ‘Made in India’ apps have emerged and one such app is the Koo app, which is an Indianised version of the popular micro-blogging site Twitter.
What is Koo?
Koo, a homegrown micro-blogging platform.
The app supports multiple Indian regional languages. At the time of writing this, Koo supports Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Oriya and Assamese.
Users on Koo can share posts, audio, video, photos on the platform. Like Twitter, Koo also allows users to chat with each other via DMs.
How to download Koo?
Koo is available for download on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Users can download the social media app on their iPhone and Android devices. The app has an average rating of 4.7 stars on Google Play Store and 4.1 on the iOS App Store.
“Key organisations from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) have set up accounts on Koo, India’s own micro-blogging platform. This move comes as a strategic response as an action against Twitter for not complying with the order for blocking around 257 Tweets and Twitter accounts which were tweeting about farmer genocide,” Koo said in a statement.
So far Koo has verified handles of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), MyGov, Digital India, India Post, National Informatics Centre (NIC), National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT), Common Services Center, UMANG app, Digi Locker, National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) to name a few.
On Tuesday, another prominent leader Piyush Goyal, Ministery of Railways; Commerce & Industry; Consumer Affairs, and Food & Public Distribution too joined the Koo platform.
I am now on Koo.
Connect with me on this Indian micro-blogging platform for real-time, exciting and exclusive updates.
Let us exchange our thoughts and ideas on Koo.
📱 Join me: https://t.co/zIL6YI0epM pic.twitter.com/REGioTdMfm
— Piyush Goyal (@PiyushGoyal) February 9, 2021
Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-Founder and CEO, Koo, said: “We believe that it is important to build social networks keeping in mind local cultural nuances. Koo being deeply focused on India will help ensure a consistent experience for all users on the platform. We are humbled and at the same time excited by the adoption and encouragement by so many noteworthy personalities and recently the entry of the topmost government offices of the country onto Koo.”