The move to ban as many as 59 apps that had more or less a Chinese origin by the union government on Monday added fuel to the fire of an already contentious issue of the role played by social media apps such as TikTok for poor, marginalised or people with low socio-economic status. Social media users argued that these apps, especially TikTok have given people from humble backgrounds a chance to express themselves and showcase their talents for the audience worldwide.
The ban may have left all of them confused and looking for other options to carry on their way to expressing themselves and their talents. Here are some of the options that may provide alternatives to the popular apps banned by the government yesterday.
TikTok
Users of TikTok can make their life easier by switching to Instagram, at least for now, and wait for some apps that may provide almost TikTok-like polished experience, or else they may also try their hands at apps such as Mitron and Chingari. Mitron and Chingari provide features but not quite at the TikTok level yet. Hence, switching to Instagram, for now, is a more viable option given the people famous on TikTok may also have some level of Instagram presence to start with.
ShareIt
The app was widely used by smartphone users for data transfer between devices. It is a useful application but not quite of the same irreplaceable value as of TikTok. iOS users can use the inbuilt Airdrop feature given with iPhones to transfer files within the Apple ecosystem while the Android users may opt for an easy working Files Go app developed by Google itself to share and manage data transfer on android devices.
UC Browser
UC Browser may not have the same amount of distribution as Google’s Chrome but it’s still a key player when it comes to mobile browsers. Users may switch to other browsers such as Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft-designed Edge on their android and iOS devices.
CamScanner
The app provided an essential feature of sending important documents in the format of PDFs after converting files from images in JPEG format. However, there are alternatives to this app now and users may opt for apps such as Microsoft Lens and Adobe Scan to fulfill the same goal.
Users of WeChat should not go searching for too far and opt for WhatsApp instead as it is the most popular chatting app across the globe that also provides end-to-end encryption. Moreover, you don’t need to convince people to download and use WhatsApp in order to build communication as invariably the person will have the app on their phone anyway.
