Patanjali's Kimbho taken down from Play Store; major security flaws discovered in first few hours
Ramdev's Patanjali saw an opportunity when popular applications like Facebook and WhatsApp started struggling with privacy issues. The Indian company launched their own "swadeshi messaging platform" and named it Kimbho. The platform was pitted against WhatsApp which has more than 2 billion active users across the globe.
The app downloads on Play Store took off almost immediately and reached the mark of 50,000 within a matter of hours. However, most users are now complaining that the app is nowhere to be found on Play Store.
Popular French security researcher, Elliot Anderson (name based on fictional character), claimed that the app was a security disaster as he was able to read and access messages of all the users.
So far, there is no official word by the company. However, the security flaws and half-baked software could be the reason why the application has been taken down from the Play Store.
The website seems to be down as well. The notification on the website reads, "We are facing extremely high traffic on Kimbho. We are in process of upgrading our servers and will be back shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please stay tuned."
The security flaws is not the only probable reason behind the app being taken down. The screenshots used in the application's homepage had a Pakistani actress Mawra Hocane which doesn't sit well with Patanjali "swadeshi" scheme.
Kimbho is also being claimed to be copy application of Bolo, another chatting application. According to Anderson, the app is still sending requests to bolomessenger.com. Few users put up screenshots of the OTP message sent by the application which still carried a "Bolo" tag.
The @KimbhoApp is a copy paste of another #application. The description and the screenshots in the app stores are the same. Moreover, the #Kimbho app is making request to bolomessenger[.]com
The Kimbho application is facing problems that would usually pop up when an app is in the beta stage. Though the company is pitching against giants like WhatsApp, the start has been very rocky for the "swadeshi" application.
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