With many of the newer apps from small developers, there is no clarity on why certain permissions are sought on the device.

Instagram on Wednesday launched its short video feature called Reels in India. But it is not the only app trying to slip into the space vacated by TikTok. In fact, less than a fortnight after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) banned 59 Chinese apps, Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store are teeming with alternatives to these platforms and software applications.

Not all of them are new. For instance, Roposo, which has an offering similar to TikTok, has been around for a few years. This app from the InMobi Group, however, has seen an exponential increase in user base recently and now claims over 100 million users. A lot of the new entrants are nowhere near these numbers, nor are they able to offer the privacy features of the established apps, making them prone to hacking or stealing of critical user information, experts said.

What are these new apps?

According to experts, there are two kinds of apps which have rushed to fill the vacuum created by Chinese apps. There are established apps which have been around for a very long period of time and were already competing with the Chinese offerings. Others, however, are like ‘fly-by-night operators’, which have downloaded entire app codes from online market places such as Codecanyon and are trying to take advantage of the anti-China sentiment, cyber-security experts warned.

“These apps can be bought from online marketplaces for as little as Rs 3,000. These scripts are easy to buy, and even the owner of the apps does not know how the app works. Now, if 10 people buy the same script, all the apps will have the same flaw,” independent security researcher Indrajeet Bhuyan said.

This is exactly what happened with TikTok clone Mitron, which a Pakistani coding company claimed was brought from it for just $34. The app is back now after Google Play store removed it for a while because of privacy policy violations.

Explained: How will the ban of TikTok and other Chinese apps be enforced; what will be the impact?

What are the issues with these apps?

One of the major issues, cyber-security experts said, is the lack of data privacy norms and guidelines in these apps.

“The nationality of an app isn’t enough to guarantee its safety. One source of vulnerability of course is the app on the phone, but also where is it centrally stored, and how it is kept also matters. The location of the data by itself does nothing,” Raman Chima, Asia-Pacific policy director at AccessNow explained.

With the newer apps from small developers, there is also no clarity on why certain permissions are being sought on the device. For example, most of the alternatives launched over the past 10 days seek permissions to view contacts and gallery.

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A Pune-based cyber-security researcher warned that with little knowledge about who owns these platforms and whether the app’s code also scans and stores private data of a user, no one is likely to be held accountable in case of a breach. “For well established apps, their reputation is at stake and therefore will seek only enough data to run the programme. These new apps, which have rushed to take benefit of the vacuum, have nothing to lose. Even if the app is reading and storing your private chat, there is no way to know because nobody has any idea of what their codes contain,” he said.

Usually a new app such as these take months to get a decent number of users. However, in the present wave even such apps are getting tens of thousands of downloads. Even for some of the older apps, the sudden increase in their user base will create vulnerabilities because of a lack of data handling capacity or safety measures, the experts said.

Do such apps bode well for the Indian app ecosystem?

Despite the surge, experts don’t see this being a long-term phenomenon, or any of these apps developing into world class products. “They (users) will quickly move on to easily available alternatives. In the short term, some knockoffs might appear but in the longer run, it is a chance for the ecosystem to mature and take the place left vacant,” technology research firm Counterpoint said in a note.

Other experts, however, highlighted that India cannot benefit from creating a walled garden in which only domestic apps are allowed to function. “There are many other apps which are international and perhaps for a good reason. That is always going to be the case. The system will mature only when you have domestic apps which are globally or even regionally competitive. A lot of Indian apps are not aggressively marketed,” Chima said.

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