As India celebrated its 72nd Independence Day on August 15, 2018, a new chat app was launched to compete with the world's largest instant messaging application, WhatsApp. Namaste Chat is fully developed in India, complying with the government's "Make in India" initiative as opposed to WhatsApp's foreign origin.
While a home-grown chat app has its own appeal, WhatsApp's user-friendliness is hard to compete with. Let's take a look at what Namaste Chat app offers, with which it thinks it can take over 200-million-strong WhatsApp userbase in India.
Namaste Chat app's biggest highlight is the feature called Vapor, which is borrowed from the likes of Snapchat. As anyone could guess, Vapor mode lets users communicate with self-destructive messages to boost a sense of privacy and security. The messages disappear automatically right after the recipient reads it, and the mode prevents taking screenshots as well.
Namaste Chat's Vapor mode is a strong reason why users might be inclined towards this new app, but there are many other features. Namaste Chat app's users can send normal messages, create groups with up to 5,000 people, like and dislike content in group chats, content sharing, an option secretly exit a group, conduct polls and events and lets users chat without having a contact number.
Namaste Chat is not solely a messaging app. There's a dedicated column for news and entertainment in three different languages. To test Namaste Chat, we downloaded the 30MB app from Play Store and here's what we learned:
Namaste Chat has a pretty self-explanatory interface, but it is not as sophisticated as WhatsApp. The Vapor mode is quite useful, but that's about it. The news integration seems like the app is losing its purpose and the content offered in those sections is not appealing.
We did not experience any lags during our brief time with the app, but we haven't been using it as frequently as WhatsApp. One of the main reasons behind this is the lack of users on the platform to communicate with. But that's not even our biggest concern with Namaste Chat.
Only minutes after installing the app, we started receiving heavy battery usage notifications. The app appears to be using a lot of battery in the background and we got notified at least 3-4 times in the last hour or so. The developers of the app need to optimise the battery usage by the app if they wish to compete against WhatsApp.
WhatsApp has more than 200 million monthly active users in India alone and Namaste Chat app has managed to attract 10,000+ downloads since its launch a day ago. The new app lacks several features that WhatsApp currently offers, including voice and video calling facility, payments, live location sharing and last seen timestamp.
It remains to be seen how quickly Namaste Chat app will gain users based on its "Make in India" compliance and popularity of Vapor mode, but it has a slim chance of displacing WhatsApp from its dominant position in India.
