Design Over Downloads: How Poor User Experience Killed India's Twitter Alternative

When China snuck up on the world with its powerful DeepSeek artificial intelligence (AI) model, discussions in India centered around why India wasn’t able to accomplish such a feat. It was a double whammy as just over a month prior, the country’s capabilities had been similarly questioned after China’s “sixth generation” stealth fighter aircraft was unveiled.

The despondency about India’s shallow high-technology portfolio is not unfounded; surprisingly, India has yet to come up with (either at all or of note) a search engine, an operating system, a bullet train, a jet engine, a passenger aircraft, and various other strategically significant technologies of our time.

There is, however, one important thing in this technology bracket that India did manage to come up with earlier this decade — a social media platform. At any rate, an attempt was made. The made-in-India offering rapidly entered the Indian stream of thought, and quite literally so, in parallel to the novel coronavirus’ inroads into societies.

After a bright beginning and a confident surge backed by handsome tailwinds, the fortunes began to dwindle just as rapidly, and before long, the ‘make in India’ product fizzled out. It became a tale of what could have been, though by now it has largely exited the Indian public memory — out of sight, out of mind.

Some reasonable explanations have since surfaced and grown to be generally accepted for why the Indian social media platform didn’t pan out, chiefly “the mood of the market and the funding winter,” as stated by the company’s cofounders in a note before they shut shop.

However, one reason has surprisingly evaded the majority opinion on the social media platform’s fall — it just wasn’t a great product. In particular, it never could deliver the user experience necessary for such a product to fly. Thus, the potential to build a world-class Indian product was squandered.

The Yellow Bird is Born

The world unexpectedly ran into a pandemic in early 2020. As people around the world began to train themselves to stay indoors, the online world became an outsized extension of the physical world that people couldn’t access anymore.

India was no exception. People began to spend more time online. So sudden was the spike in online use that a survey from the first week of India’s Covid-19 lockdown found that social media use increased by nearly 75 per cent compared to the previous week.

Anyone with aspirations to start up in the digital space, and in the social media space in particular, wouldn’t have needed a second invitation. Not when there also appeared to be a problem to solve — the dominance of the English language across the social media landscape whose inhabitants originally speak and write in very many languages beyond English.

In India alone, there are 22 major languages spoken and written — a small sample inadequately representing the vast language diversity of India. It's safe to say over 80 per cent of the country speaks an Indian language. Extending the language platter to the world, the number of major spoken and written languages likely runs into hundreds.

And thus was born India’s own social media platform and Twitter alternative, Koo, whose purpose was to cater first to vernacular India and then to the vernacular world.

Indic Language Focus

Founded in March 2020, Koo’s unique selling point was that it stood as a counterpoint to the dominance of English-language social media. The microblogging application allowed users to communicate with each other in their mother tongue via text, audio, and video. It was pitched by its makers as a ‘voice of India in Indian languages.’

The Indic language focus of Koo’s founders, Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, had a precedent. Before Koo, there was Vokal, a question-and-answer-based knowledge sharing platform for the Indian-language user in 2017. It was like a Quora where knowledge could be shared in regional languages. Feedback from Vokal users prompted the need for public expression beyond just question-answers in local languages.

Going further back, the cofounders previously built out a voice-first WhatsApp in 2017 — it fell away because competing with the widely used WhatsApp was no joke — and subsequently a voice-first platform for status updates. Thus, common to all their enterprises was empowerment of the non-English-speaking population of India and the world. In 2020, Koo emerged as an extension of this work.

Koo was thus born out of sound reasoning. This was even evident from the fact that it caught on like wildfire months into its launch. It won the Modi government's Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge in the social category. Soon enough, it earned a shoutout from Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself on his ‘Mann ki Baat’ address.

With Koo, public figures and influencers suddenly felt like they had an opportunity to connect with their core audiences, who likely reside outside of the urban English-speaking metros, in a language other than English — and more importantly, in a language with which they were most comfortable expressing themselves — around locally relevant topics. Political leaders, spiritual teachers, cricketers, actors, writers, journalists, and a whole host of other celebrities took to Koo in droves.

Spurred by the influx of high-profile users, Koo became a top-10 news app in India by July 2020 (four months in), rose to 200,000 downloads by August 2020 (five months in), and, before the end of the year, by November 2020, was the top app on the Google Play app store with over 1 million downloads (eight months in).

Two other things quickened and widened Koo’s reach among the Indian population. One was India and China squaring off after skirmishes between their respective troops in Ladakh, leading to a ban on 59 Chinese apps in India and a shot in the arm for the Modi government’s ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat (Self-Reliant India)’ vision. Two were the Modi government’s squabbles with Jack Dorsey’s Twitter over content moderation and censorship. The stricter information technology (IT) rules introduced in 2021 made Twitter hesitate in complying with the new rules, while Koo was only too glad to comply.

Even cofounder and chief executive officer (CEO) Radhakrishna admitted: "We came into the limelight because of Twitter's tension with the government, but users soon realized they can express in their mother tongue only on Koo.”

Wings Get Clipped

The tailwinds took Koo to newer heights — 60 million app downloads, peak daily and monthly active users of about 2 million and 10 million, respectively; handsome inroads into parts of the foreign market, like Nigeria (where Koo took Twitter’s place almost overnight) and Brazil; a peak valuation of nearly $300 million, powered by funding of over $60 million from investors like Tiger Global and Accel; a rise to become the second largest microblogging platform in the world (as per Koo themselves); and, according to cofounders, “just months away from beating Twitter in India in 2022.”

But despite odds stacked in its favour, Koo started to dip. The social media service’s cofounders pointed to a “prolonged funding winter” as the primary cause. “A prolonged funding winter which hit us at our peak hurt our plans at the time and we had to tone down on our growth trajectory,” said their farewell note published on LinkedIn. “We needed 5 to 6 years of aggressive, long term and patient capital to make this dream a reality. Unfortunately for us, the mood of the market and the funding winter got the better of us.”

Koo’s active user base fell from 7.2 million in June 2023 to 2.7 million in February 2024, and its makers were seemingly left with no ways to stem the fall. Around the middle of 2024, Koo’s leadership waved the white flag.

Twitter-Like, But Also Not Quite

Koo was not very different from then Twitter (now X). Its users could post Koos, an equivalent of tweets, with each Koo’s length capped off at 400 characters instead of the 280 for tweets.

Users could post text, audio and video Koos, and polls, like on Twitter, and also Re-Koo and Re-Koo with Comment like the Twitter-equivalent actions of retweet and retweet with comment.

Every user had a feed and options for people to follow, unfollow, and block, recommendations for people (or accounts) to follow, direct messaging, and hashtags for trending topics, along with language-specific additions like an English-to-regional-language keyboard, language news feeds, and a talk-to-type feature drawn from Vokal.

You wouldn't be blamed if you thought Koo was quite the Twitter copy. “What I couldn't figure out in the entire lifespan of Koo is how it was different from Twitter,” affirms Rajdeep Ghosh, a product designer who reworked Koo’s design extensively as a personal project in September 2021.

However, Koo did differ from Twitter in some ways beyond the regional language focus, largely to its detriment.

The app was “terrible” to use, and “the interface was bland,” according to Srikanth Ramakrishnan, an avid internet and social media user for over two decades, since back when Myspace and later Orkut were in vogue, and someone who is deeply involved in multimedia creation at a centre of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

The problems began right at the start of a new Koo user’s journey: the sign-up. While one could create a new Twitter account with an email address, Koo asked for a mobile number.

Parting with a mobile number, with which one’s personal and often sensitive information is connected, raises a greater level of discomfort than an email address — especially for a platform that’s new and one is simply getting a feel for. So signing up on Koo using one’s mobile number was often accompanied by a level of hesitation.

For those who didn’t mind signing up or logging in using their mobile number, other problems cropped up. Often the overseas users — who Koo targeted after the initial success — as well as users in India reported getting stuck at the sign-up or login stage because they would not receive an “OTP,” or one-time password, after inputting their mobile number, thereby stalling their entry into the platform. The more committed ones persisted until they got in.

Radhakrishna explained his preference for a mobile number login over email login in a tweet in February 2021. “Language communities of India do not use email to login and hence was not the priority of the company,” he said, clarifying that the email login feature had been introduced for a short period of time before it was “blocked from view” after “concerns” were “raised.” Fair enough, but it didn’t help Koo’s case as the mobile number-based-OTP sign-in became a stumbling block for more than a few.

The platform wasn’t exactly smooth-sailing after the user had logged in. A walkthrough of the app’s features — an essential — was missing. The user had to presume Koo worked like Twitter and use the app accordingly.

When users moved through various sections of the app, they found the app to be frustratingly slow and buggy, and it even crashed on occasions of peak use, such as in early 2021 when the platform witnessed a very large influx of people amid the Government of India-Twitter clashes and upon the urging of high-profile figures, including ministers and celebrities.

When it was working well, posts on the feed lined up chronologically, from the latest to oldest. Twitter was different — it pushed posts based on user engagement. While it’s a judgement call which way you go — the chronological ordering is even preferred by quite a few — it’s much harder to draw in and retain users on the platform through a chronological listing of posts. A healthy injection of posts that are generally attracting widespread user interest into the feed keeps users engaged.

It also didn’t help that Koo was a standalone platform. “What I appreciated the most about Twitter, in the 2009-14 era in particular, was that you could connect other apps to it,” Ramakrishnan says. “There were lots of games where you could connect with your Twitter account. So your Twitter profile would be your profile on that website. It would post your scores, etc. Your circle on that website would be based on the people you follow and those who follow you on Twitter,” he adds. Koo was sort of a be-all and end-all platform, and it didn’t do a very good job of keeping users engaged.

Subpar User Experience

Product designer Ghosh was in college when Covid hit. He suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands and was exploring various apps. “I always had a fascination for trying out new apps and what's new around the Play Store. I saw there's this app called Koo. I was like, ‘Not sure what it is, but it sounds fun.’ So I looked up Koo. It popped up that it’s India's first microblogging platform where users can post in their own native languages. I think that was the whole use case about it. So I thought, let's try it,” Ghosh tells Swarajya.

The only problem: “I downloaded it and used the app, and, to be honest, I didn't like the app.”

Ghosh’s “unsatisfying journey through the app” led him to take up redesigning Koo with the aim of improving its user experience as a personal project. “Because I was planning to start my career in design at that time, I thought it was a good opportunity if I could take this up as a personal project, where I am redesigning the whole user interface of Koo. And I thought if Koo actually likes it, who knows, they might also implement it,” he says.

In his case study, Ghosh summed up his experience of the app thus: “I faced a lot of trouble navigating through the app and finding relevant stuff. The screens were cluttered with so many options that I often found myself overwhelmed and not being able to complete any task. The design also felt outdated with poor organisation, layout and, most importantly, inconsistency.”

The budding product designer meticulously redesigned each part of the app over 14 weeks in 2021 and published a blog on what his version of Koo would be like.

Probably recognising design to be a problem, Koo underwent a makeover in 2022. However, according to Ghosh, the app still fell short: “I won't call it a redesign. I would call it a visual fix. Even then, it was not up to the mark. Neither could it get rid of all the problems, nor did it look much better.”

There were others like Ghosh who saw plenty of room for improvement in Koo’s user experience and gave redesigning it a shot.

In his case study, product designer Bhairav Singh Choudhary noted, “The user interface exhibits a somewhat outdated design and lacks a modern feel. Furthermore, I encountered inconsistencies in the overall design and experienced several usability issues while using the app.”

Even Koo’s direct messaging, a pretty basic social media feature, needed a fix. Even some active users of Koo didn't know if the app had a DM feature, let alone casual users.

“Normally on all major social platforms, the DM (direct messaging) option is given in front of the profile section but on Koo, it is hidden in 3 dots (top right corner),” product designer Manu Upadhyay diagnosed in his case study. His rework involved making Koo’s DM feature more visible to users, especially because, he reasoned, over 70 per cent of users actively use DMs on other social media platforms.

But there was another trick that Koo was missing. Direct messaging on Koo stood to benefit from reflecting Koo’s strength of multilinguality.

Upadhyay, who works on app design and UI/UX, thus, redesigned the DM feature to not only make it more visible and accessible but also lent it the multilingual capabilities limited to Koos (posts on the app) — the platform’s USP — so that language wouldn’t be a barrier even in private chats.

"In the design solution that I proposed, say in DMs (direct messages), and say you are Bengali and I am a Telugu speaker, we both express good thoughts online, but we are a bit out of sync because of the language. So one thing they could have done is, say the Bengali person DMs in Bengali, then the Telugu speaker should have been able to see that message in Telugu. Isn’t this a product innovation? But Koo kept it limited. Like how it was available in the feed, it wasn’t available in DMs. Such experimentation is necessary," Upadhyay told Swarajya.

According to Upadhyay, Koo wasn't ruthless enough with their strengths. "Koo had a simple USP — you could read posts in different languages. But they got to a point and didn’t do much (after that). Like in Brazil, they got good traction. Even their government gave Koo support. But once you know your strength, you should ruthlessly march ahead with that strength," he said.

Koofessions: Design Not a Priority

Koo was a lockdown project, as acknowledged by cofounder Bidawatka. Unfortunately, the design seemed to give off “lockdown project” vibes. It remained unpolished all through its existence, even after it got some experience upgrades in 2022.

According to Anurag Ramdasan, partner and head of investments at 3one4 Capital and someone who managed Koo closely, the app wasn’t great because it sprung into the limelight too early. “Given the geopolitics and some of those things, they came into a lot of attention very early in their life cycle. And of course, that early in the life cycle, most of these companies do not have good apps. Obviously, app development is a process. It takes time to refine and improve experience. So the first impression for a lot of people was that it was not a good app,” he told Swarajya.

Ramdasan, however, gave the team credit for improving the app over time. “They did end up improving the app very, very aggressively and quickly. And that was commendable. So over a period of time, we did see the usage stabilise. We did see retentions improve. Obviously that sudden influx (of users) coming in, it gave people the impression that maybe the app is not good, but that was at a certain point in the company’s journey. The app did significantly improve post that,” he said, adding, “But obviously, there were many other things that didn't go their way,” referring to the popular diagnosis of Koo’s fundraising cycle being off-timed.

“Koo had raised their monies in the early-to-mid part of 2021, so Koo found themselves fundraising in the wrong end of the cycle. And that made life difficult. The nature of these app companies is that you're not monetising, you're scaling. Now comes the market, like 2023, where you are saying ‘I have no revenue. I am just growing. Please give me money.’ No one is touching such companies,” Ramdasan said.

Koo underwent a redesign in 2022 with the goal of improving user experience two years into its journey.

"Design involves many things — one is visual sense; that is, something looks great; second level is functionality, where the functioning is so smooth that you don’t even know things are happening. A good design is one where you don’t even know your work is getting done and you’re not having to bear any cognitive load in going about your work. Third is interaction; at the interaction level, how much can you improve the app in terms of user experience?" Upadhyay explains.

User experience, however, was Koo's Achilles' heel. According to a conversation revealed to Swarajya between a product designer, who requested anonymity, and a former design leader at Koo, the ex-employee admitted, “Even if you see now (after the redesign), it is not the best experience. Though it is a lot better than when I joined, it is still not up to the mark.” He thought Koo “paled in comparison” to his earlier design work for major brands.

According to this ex-employee, user experience wasn’t a priority for the social media company. The leadership was more obsessed with increasing the number of users on the platform. “Koo is not a design-driven company. They are only chasing short-term goals — increase the numbers, increase the numbers, increase the numbers. In doing so, (user) experience takes a hit. Improving (user) experience takes more work in the present, but it helps in the long run. As for the numbers, you increase it now, but they fall again tomorrow. How much will you firefight?”

Curiously, this designer who worked for Koo in a senior role had himself redesigned the app prior to joining the company as a personal project — like the other professionals who Swarajya spoke to. He then joined Koo with hopes of improving it for the better, seeing the great potential in it, but found himself dejected within a year and a half of working there. “It’s not even close to Twitter,” the former employee admitted to the product designer with whom Swarajya spoke, adding that “it could have been made better than Twitter.”

According to this former senior designer at Koo, the product was initially designed on a powerpoint and a top leader in Koo was “obsessed” with keeping the product as it was, the way he had designed it. “So whatever changes we would make, they were very limited. The changes had to be made within his design framework,” he revealed, adding that he was often having to defend Koo’s bad design against his own colleagues, who quizzed him about it repeatedly.

“There should have been a lot of focus on (user) experience at Koo, for which they even got a lot of time, but unfortunately, it didn’t happen, and then obviously the product had to suffer,” the ex-employee said.

"Think about it," says Upadhyay, "If something looks beautiful, if there isn’t any effort in navigating the app, how pleasing it is to use. But if the experience of the app isn’t good, say it’s not visually striking, then the audience might give the app a try for a while, but then might drift away and return to more entrenched alternatives, like Twitter."

Can India Top Koo?

Koo didn’t pan out. But can India draw lessons from the Koo experiment and put out a world-class indigenous social media platform?

According to Ramdasan, it depends on the market. “If you look at any social media platform, they are all visibly built out in a good bull market. Because you genuinely need investors who are very, very optimistic and are willing to fund non-monetising businesses. You do not get that in a bear market. So I think it's a function of will the markets become conducive enough for people to want to look at social media as a space again.”

Ramdasan says a social media venture is a hard sell for investors. “What are you asking investors to do at this point, with social media? They are saying, ‘Look, put $50-100 million in a company. Even after you put $50-100 million, it will not make money, but that's okay, this is how this business has to be built.’ That is a pitch you make to an optimistic investor in an optimistic market. So, I don't know (about a successor to Koo), it may happen, but it may not necessarily happen in the short term,” he says.

According to Ramakrishnan, any Koo successor in India will have to carve its own path rather than try to be a “cheap copycat” of a well-established social media platform to be successful. “If I were to build a Twitter alternative or Koo, for that matter, I would create an interface that was radically different. I would do something to make the content engaging, not the same old routine where you type some words, share an image, make it clickbaity, and try to get people to respond to it,” he says.

“I would do something meaningful in terms of how a person can communicate with a social media platform,” he adds. “I would say this about any Twitter alternative. All of them have had the same problems. Even Donald Trump’s platform has the same problem — it’s all old wine in the same old bottle with a new label, not even old wine in a new bottle.”

Koo’s journey offers up a critical lesson: a favourable market and strong political backing are not enough to ensure success. User experience is paramount. In a competitive digital landscape, only those who prioritise product quality, engagement, and innovation can sustain long-term growth.

As India marches on its journey towards digital self-reliance, Koo’s rise and fall serves as both an inspiration and a warning — a reminder that the right idea must be backed by great execution to stand the test of time.