India’s Fastest Growing Social Media App ShareChat Now in Kannada

India’s fastest growing social media app, ShareChat, is now available in Kannada. ShareChat is a first-of-its-kind regional language social networking platform, focused completely on India with 1.5 crore registered users and available in 10 languages of Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Odia and Kannada.

A report by KPMG and Google states that nine out of 10 new internet users will be using internet in their native language. Though this is a very positive sign, one drawback is that there are still no world-class products available which can deliver a truly Indian experience digitally. In this background, ShareChat was started by a team of IIT alumni in 2015 to address this need gap.

Recently, ShareChat has developed a Kannada only interface, using the locally prevalent words and phrases. All the technical terms in the product have been recreated in Kannada, so that a person who is not well conversant with English can also use the product with ease. ShareChat has been made keeping in view the first-time internet users and is thus very simple and intuitive by design. The app promises to host special categories and tags for festivals celebrated locally, encompassing culture and literature, education, locally trending news, Sandalwood (Kannada cinema) along with fun, entertainment, devotion and sports.

If the user finds the content interesting he or she can even share it on WhatsApp to his or her friends, thus maximizing the reach. This eventually will result in digitization of a lot of specialised areas including literature, thus preserving and further developing the varied cultural heritage in these times of fast paced technology.

The existing users have been really excited about the launch in Kannada. As of now many users knowing Kannada were using the app in other languages such as Telugu and Tamil.  The persistent demand from the users was one of the primary inspiration to launch the language soon. Ravi Kumar, a ShareChat user from Mandya commented, “One of my friends recommended ShareChat to me, as he was accessing the app in Telugu. I was eager to install the app in Kannada, but unfortunately it was not available at that time. I am now looking forward to be on the Kannada version.”

Another user, Shankar from Hubballi said, “It is wonderful to have a social networking app in Kannada. Now I will be able to access interesting content such as jokes, news and updates from here in Kannada which I can send to my friends and family through WhatsApp.”

Commenting on the launch, Farid Ahsan, CEO of ShareChat said, "ShareChat has always focused on providing a culturally relevant and truly Indian social media platform for the internet consumers of India. We at ShareChat feel proud in launching another two languages, Odia and Kannada today. It is one of the many steps taken by our team to promote the digitization of Indian languages. We are determined to make the vision of Digital India a reality and our efforts are a big leap forward in that direction."