Why ‘Mitron’ may not be a real friend
The video-sharing app fuelled by anti-chinese sentiment has been taken down from Google Play Store
Several attempts have been made in the past to promote swadeshi products but few have enjoyed the roaring success of the short video app ‘Mitron’ — just a month old — before it was taken down from the Google Play Store on Tuesday.
With over five million downloads since its launch in April, the developers or owners of the app managed to leverage two things: naming the app ‘Mitron’, a term made popular by Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is perceived as a champion of nationalism, and feeding the need to find an alternative to China’s Tiktok.
Though it has been reported that the team behind the app is led by an IIT alumnus by the name of Shivank Aggarwal, attempts to trace this person led to a dead end. The team went by the name of Shopkiller and maintained that it was working in stealth mode.
Google confirmed the suspension of the app from its Play Store. The Google Play Store has a ‘Spam and Minimum Functionality Policy’ and can take down apps for, among other things,
repetitive content. Examples of violations include ‘Copying content from other apps without adding any original content or value’ and ‘Creating multiple apps with highly similar functionality, content, and user experience’.
Mitron’s popularity would probably have continued had it not come to light that the source code of the app was developed in Pakistan. The entity called Shopkiller had bought the app’s source code from a Pakistan-based firm called
Qboxus. The sale took place on Codecanyon, a marketplace for the buying and selling of scripts, entire apps, and components for a variety of languages and frameworks.
Branded a ‘Pakistani app’, the initial euphoria around Mitron’s rise collapsed like a souffle.
The developer community, however, says that buying source codes of popular apps is quite a common practice everywhere in the world. “There are at least 500 developers selling source codes for popular apps like Instagram, Tinder, Uber etc. If just the source code was enough, anyone could have built these apps,” said Deepak Abbot, founder of financial technology firm Flat White Capital.
What needs to be commended, said Abbot, is the hacker mindset of the team that developed Mitron. “They used the right name, identified the right opportunity at the right time and used the right kind of Whatsapp marketing and got as many downloads as they did in such a short period of time.”
The growing sentiment against Chinese apps, leading to uninstall campaigns on social media platforms, coupled with the Prime Minister’s call to be ‘Vocal for Local’ fuelled Mitron’s growth to a large extent.
Qboxus’ ‘Tictic’ — an Android media app for creating and sharing short videos v2.5, available on Codecanyon for $34 (about ~2,570) — is one of the bestselling app codes this week. The developer also sells an Android code for ‘Hashgram’, a clone of Instagram ($19), ‘Binder’, a dating app like Tinder ($44) and several other ready-to-use codes for ecommerce and food ordering websites.
However, the popularity that Mitron managed to gain in a short span is striking. For example, there were at least 14 other apps available on Google Play Store as of Monday evening, whose names were quite similar to Mitron and offering similar or different services. Given Mitron’s success, many have tried to clone the clone. However, experts believe that clone apps do not have well defined data usage and privacy policies which puts the users under risk.
“It is becoming increasingly common for the source code of applications to be bought on the cheap, be slightly modified, and then re-published on app stores where people behind these apps are able to turn over revenue through ads/in-app purchases. To most users, these applications are indistinguishable from those developed by larger companies and that is where the problem lies. An already existing trust deficit is widened when unmaintained applications are mass produced in such a fashion," said Karan Saini, a security researcher.
The Mitron app did, at some point last week, put up a simple, single page privacy policy. An email sent to Shopkiller e-commerce did not elicit any response.
As Abbot said, the shelf life of a lot of these apps is short. "Mitron may fade away in a couple of months, given the engineering might of Tiktok but what it has achieved by riding on anti-chinese app sentiment is commendable," he said.