Early this year, when the Indian government was in a battle with Twitter, an Indian-developed alternative called Koo, was launched. The micro-blogging platform, which shares several features with the platform it is trying to replace, was originally designed specifically for Indians as it offered its services in multiple local languages. A new report has announced that Koo is now available in Nigeria. This comes shortly after the Nigerian government banned Twitter in the country.

According to India Today, Koo made the announcement on Saturday, a day after the Federal Government of Nigeria banned Twitter. The CEO of Koo, Aprameya Radhakrishna, not only confirmed that it now offers its services in Nigeria but also revealed that they are considering offering it in a local Nigerian language too. There are over 500 native languages spoken in Nigeria including Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba.

The Twitter ban has resulted in several users including some government officials resorting to VPNs to access the platform as all internet service providers in the country have blocked access to it. It remains to be seen if these users will switch to Koo or stick to Twitter.

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Following India’s ban of a multitude of several Chinese apps, there have been some Indian developers that have launched local equivalents of the banned apps. An example is FAU-G which is supposed to be a sort of replacement for PUBG. Now, a new micro-blogging platform called Koo has been announced in the country and it shares several similarities to Twitter.

Twitter is currently at loggerheads with the India government following the latter’s request for the micro-blogging platform to block several accounts. Some of these accounts are said to have tweeted using certain hashtags associated with the ongoing farmers’ protest in the country. Twitter did ban some accounts but didn’t suspend others as it believed the orders given to ban these accounts were not consistent with Indian laws.

Koo is supposed to be the Indian alternative to Twitter and several government officials and politicians have joined the platform. It has a bird as its logo just like Twitter, has limited number of characters for its posts which it calls “koos” (you can also re-koo and re-koo with comment), and uses a similar four-tab interface when you check a user’s account. It does have its own differences too such as icons to quickly share to WhatsApp and Facebook.

As at the time of writing, Koo has over 68,000 installs on the Play Store and while it is far from the number of installs Twitter has, it is growing to become an alternative to Twitter for Indians. The app currently supports five Indian languages but the developers have confirmed that more languages are coming soon. There is also a web version for those who prefer a desktop experience.

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