It has been a topsy-turvy time for the two-member team behind the Mitron app, which has been in the news for various conflicting reasons.
At first, Mitron emerged out of nowhere to be seen as a brave challenger to the popular and powerful TikTok. It totted up over 5 million downloads in less than a month.
But then, Mitron ran into some bad form. It was first allleged to be a rebadged version of a Pak app. Then Google removed it from its Play Store for alleged violation of its privacy policy.
Now, Mitron App, founded by a former IIT Rourkee student Shivank Agarwal and his friend Anish Khandelwal, is back in the thick of things.
It is now available again on Google Play Store.
And the two founders of Mitron app say they are keen to take it forward, even as they play down the charge that it is a rebadged version of a Pak app.
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Not from Pak, but from market place
In a chat with Indian Express, Agarwal and Khandelwal say that they purchased an initial template of the app from Envato, which is an Australian market place to buy and sell digital assets.
Such off-the-shelf buying is not uncommon in the software world. Many top apps had in fact purchased such templates and tweaked it to their market convenience.
The duo added that they had completely revamped the source code to meet their scalability and security requirements.
Pooh-poohing the allegation that it is a Pak app, Agarwal and Khandelwal asserted: "Envato is a marketplace where users can purchase licensed code. We also purchased a template from this marketplace and we are the legal owners of the codebase of Mitron."
Stating that their product is completely a “Make In India product”, the founders said the entire production-ready code was developed in Bengaluru.
On the issue of Google removing the Mitron app from the Play Store, they said the app is fully restored on Play Store without any change to the content. "The major concern was that we didn’t have a proper reporting platform which is required for a UGC platform. We are working on adding that feature on our app." Privacy policy was alos a missing documentation, which they have now addressed, too.
The controversial Mitron app founders Shivank Agarwal and Anish Khandelwal tell me their app has nothing to do with Pakistan coding company and also talk about Google removing the app from Play store. Read the interview here 👇🏼 https://t.co/JgWzZ3od5oJune 9, 2020
The road ahead
Mitron is now contemplating tweaking the user interface, which as of now looks a TikTok clone, in a bid to create its own niche in the market.
Mitron is also on its way to getting itself available on the Apple app store.
Having pegged itself as a hardcore Indian product, Mitron is planning to making its itself available in various Indian regional languages.
Going the whole hog on the app's Indian tag, the founders say:"Indian consumers should be served by Indian platforms and Indian data should always be secured on Indian servers."
They say it helps to have an Indian social media platform which understands and abides by Indian community guidelines.
Verily, shots fired at TikTok.
Source: Here.
