Patanjali's swadeshi WhatsApp rival Kimbho vanished from the Play Store in a day

Patanjali Ayurved is Ramdev's swadeshi consumer-goods group, with Rs 105.61 billion ($1.6 billion) turnover in FY2017, moving into tech with the Kimbho messaging app.

A consumer-goods group's brand patriotism — 'swadeshi' appeal — could substitute for the engineering, security and infrastructure a world-class messaging app requires.

Patanjali announced Kimbho as a take on WhatsApp, asking users to download it from Google Play Store at end of May 2018.

The app disappeared from the Play Store within a day of its May 31 launch over security and performance concerns. Patanjali's explanations kept shifting: first blaming extremely high traffic for its sudden death, then calling it a one-day test, then asking for two more months before relaunch. Security researcher Elliot Alderson called it 'a security disaster' and told people not to install it; fake Kimbho apps proliferated on the Play Store; the app was ripped on Twitter.

The launch skipped every stage of a normal beta — limited users, security fixes, load testing — and went straight to a full public release.

No credible security review preceded launch; the first audit came from an outside researcher, publicly, after the fact.

The infrastructure for real-time messaging at WhatsApp scale — cloud hosting, CDN, data engineering — cannot be improvised after a launch spike.

Brand strength in toiletries and food was treated as transferable to a zero-tolerance category where a single breach is fatal.

Distribution and patriotism can install an app once; a messaging product lives on security engineering and scaled infrastructure that have to exist before launch day, not after.

As of late June 2018, Patanjali said it would relaunch in about two months, while fake Kimbho apps circulated on the Play Store. The material records no relaunch details.