and look. For the creator that lives in the tiny cities and towns all over India—nearly 90 per cent of a 1.3 billion population is based in semi-rural areas—the only way to reach their audience then would be through homegrown vernacular social media apps, that are bridging the gap that the Metas of the world haven’t been able to, ever since TikTok got banned in 2020. In fact, the Indian SM platforms have penetrated deep into the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, where English is not yet the language of the masses. Management firm RedSeer’s consulting report said that there was an annual increase of 13 per cent in Indian language users against a mere one per cent growth in English-speaking internet users. It has been also estimated that Indian language Internet users will grow at a CAGR of 18 per cent against English language users at 3 per cent (KPMG and Google April 2017 report).

Roposo and ShareChat are two of the most popular vernacular social media apps