A day after Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali launched its messaging app Kimbho, the company has withdrawn the app. Patanjali now claims that it was only a test run and that technical work is in progress and that the app will be soon launched officially.
“Patanjali Kimbho app was on the Playstore for 1 day as part of a trial. In 3 hours, 1.5 lakh people downloaded the app. We are grateful for enthusiastic response. Technical work is in progress and the Kimbho app will be officially launched soon,” SK Tijariwala, spokesperson for Patanjali said.
Kimbho, which is a Sanskrit word for ‘what’s up’ was launched on Thursday with the tagline ‘Ab Bharat Bolega’. The company said that it was going to compete directly with WhatsApp.
“Our trial version of Kimbho app is no longer available for download on any platform. We don't take any responsibility for many dulicate apps showing on anywhere. Beware!” Tijariwala added.
Within a day of going live, Kimbho faced criticism over its lack of security by an anonymous French security researcher and a few others and that the ‘Swadeshi’ app was just a revamped version of an American instant messaging app called Bolochat.
According to him, the app developed by Appdios had a critical vulnerability. Calling it a security disaster, Elliot claimed that he could access the messages of all the users.
While it was taken down from Google Playstore on Thursday itself, it was available on the Apple store till late Thursday.
A report in Alt News suggests that Patanjali could have taken over Bolo Chat app, rebranded it and launched it as Kimbho. When they tried to install the app, they found that messages received by a user for Kimbho came from Bolo App. According to the report, Bolo Chat was developed by Appdios, a Fremont, California-based company whose founders are Sumit Kumar and Aditi Kamal. Bolo chat app was originally launched in December 2015.