Indian chat app Hike faces an uphill battle to catch up with WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging service owned by social network Facebook. But founder Kavin Bharti Mittal says one new feature is proving popular with users across the developing world.
“It came out of an insight that data [in India] is expensive,” he says of Hike Direct, a service added to the group’s main app in October that lets users swap files such as music and video at high speeds without having to be online.
India has about 400m internet users, most of whom use the internet via mobile devices. Roughly 250m now own smartphones but even those with expensive devices often save money by rationing data use or turning connections off.