Last week, yoga guru Baba Ramdev looked to launch a WhatsApp competitor named Kimbho.
Unfortunately for his company Patanjali, it was a dysfunctional portrait of inadequacy and they were forced to take it down. Now, it seems the app is relaunching.
Baba Ramdev and his partner in the venture, billionaire Acharya Balakrishna, may be preparing to bring Kimbho back online, according to recent reports. Hopefully the state of affairs is a little different than what forced the app offline last week.
Just a day after its launch on May 30, the app had garnered over 50,000 downloads in the Google Play Store. That¡¯s when notable cybersecurity researcher Robert Baptiste (aka Elliot Alderson on Twitter) accused the app of having laughable security protocols. As it turns out, he says he was able to access other users¡¯ private messages, yet that wasn¡¯t even the worst news to come in.
Shortly after, another Twitter user pointed out that Kimbho wasn¡¯t an original app, but was actually a shoddy cut-and-paste job that used code from a previous messaging app, Bolo. The ploy was so laughably obvious, it used the same screenshots and description as Bolo did on the Play Store. Even worse, it also had references to the original app buried inside Kimbho, on the instructions screen, in authentication messages, and more.
The revelations forced Patanjali to take the app offline, though it outwardly claimed that there was such a huge surge in users that its servers crashed. Balkrishna however, who owns Patanjali, claims they¡¯re ready to give things another shot. ¡°We pledge not to launch the app until a team of expert hackers and security specialists plug all the security and privacy loopholes,¡± he said in a phone interview to Bloomberg. There¡¯s no word yet on when that might actually happen.