Not Happenin’ no more!

Not Happenin’ no more!

As 50-odd Chinese apps get the boot, its ardent fans down south talk about how much they will miss its services, and the inevitable task of finding an alternative, however less attractive they may be

Published: 04th July 2020 06:49 AM |

Highly popular 'TikTok' is just one among the 59 banned Chinese apps. (Photo | AP)

By Express News Service

CHENNAI : Arun Parthiban, marketing strategist and vlogger

Among the popularly used Chinese Apps, SHAREit did make life easier for transferring huge files. I am still searching for an alternative for that. CamScan was of a lot of help in my line of work but Adobe Scan is a superb alternative that we found after the ban. TikTok will be dearly missed by our youngsters and the UC Browser that people used to download movies from unauthorised sites will have to rest in peace. 

Maleeha Hasan, engineering student

The app I am going to miss the most is SHEIN. Of all the apps, this was the one I enjoyed using the most. Not only did this online shopping platform have some gorgeous styles and accessories, but it also had amazing flash sales where we could get anything listed for a huge discount (sometimes as much as 85 per cent!). I am missing all the clothes I had in my cart!

Rikit Shahi, law student

I miss CamScanner because it was my saviour during exams or when filling online applications. During exams, my friends used to circulate handwritten notes by scanning it on CamScanner. Like many students, my friends and I used to start studying one night before the exam and would keep calling the ‘topper friend’ to send these notes. If it wasn’t for these scanned notes, my friends and I would have submitted blank answer sheets.

Krithika Ramani, digital marketer

My dad was using CamScanner almost every day for his invoicing work. Now, I have to teach him to use Microsoft Lens or Adobe. He’s in the pharmaceutical field and works from home during the lockdown. Invoicing and getting the purchase order documents is very crucial for him. I told him to download other apps and try. It’s going to take a while for him to get used to it. But he’s quite upset; mainly because CamScanner correctly crops the documents for him.

Apoorva Mohan, psychology student

I’d say 50 per cent of TikTok content is problematic with sexist, violent, misogynistic tones, not to mention all the self-acclaimed experts who cropped up. I would definitely not miss that. On the other hand, it has been a great platform for small-scale content creators. For people who wanted to eventually move to large-scale sites like YouTube, TikTok was a great platform for them. Especially for queer people. There was also a lot of rural content like from farmers and truck drivers, which I would miss. Those were very wholesome to watch. Even if some of the content creators can afford a VPN (virtual private network) to bypass the ban, the same can’t be said for their target audience. And India is a huge demographic out of which maybe 20 per cent or even less will want to pay for a VPN. 

Vijay Ashokan, filmmaker 

As filmmakers, we usually have a lot of video files and photograph references to be shared between smartphones, and between smartphones and PCs or laptops. Especially during video-editing and voice-recording. SHAREit saves a lot of time that is spent towards uploading video files in the drive and downloading it on the phone. It’s a fantastic app among animators and filmmakers because we can easily share files between teams during a creative workflow. SHAREit for PC comes with a special feature that allows group sharing for up to five devices. So when a creative team is working on a project, we can send work files to them simultaneously. Despite other technological advancements, this one hasn’t lost its sheen.

Saranyaa Murkesh, programme producer (TV)

I still remember the day I installed SHEIN and spent the next few days pouring over its pages — all those dresses. I think there is no other online store that gives you such dresses for such prices. It had a winning combination of trending designs, decent quality and affordable rates. SHEIN made fashion easy for all of us. It was painful to see my favourite shopping app being banned.

Taha Naveed, engineering student

I’ll miss Xender because the best aspect of it was that it did not have intrusive ads. The app features swipe and shares, which allowed sharing with a single shake of the device. It could share any type of files from simple images to high-quality videos with great speed, which saved time and allowed multiple connections and simultaneous file-sharing between all of them.

Nausher Din, lead technology analyst

Everyone is missing TikTok, CamScanner and SHAREit, which were the most popular Chinese apps, but I’m missing Clean Master.For my Vivo Android phone, I had Clean Master to clear and optimise my storage. It used to delete all duplicate images downloaded by WhatsApp. The app also used to protect my phone from viruses. I found the app very effective for my phone. Now, until I find a better alternative, I’ll have to manually clean my phone storage.

(Inputs by Kannalmozhi Kabilan, Naaz Ghani, Tamanna S Mehdi and Vaishali Vijaykumar)