You have 2 SIM cards, one for work and one for play. You want a nice phone but don’t want to or can’t buy two nice phones so you went and got one of those dual SIM ones.
Fair enough. There’s just one problem, you want WhatsApp for both numbers! What do you do?
You download an App called ‘Parallel Space — Multiple accounts & Two face’.
For many users, apps like Parallel space may be simple ways to segregate their personal life from their work but the use case covers many of our obsessions.
Chief amongst them is secrecy. Parallel Apps allows users to hide apps on their own phones. Why do people do this?
For many families in India — the smartphone has replaced television.With one phone being shared amongst an entire family or at least between siblings, secrecy features allow people to maintain some modicum of privacy in a life that otherwise offers them none.
Many users just don’t want to be caught using a dating or chat app for fear of being ostracized by friends and family. As much as we think we’re moving forward in urban India — social concerns change slowly.
So why did the reach of this App fall so drastically?
There are a few possible reasons:
- These apps have a negative impact on phone performance.Everything from battery life to RAM gets affected. It’s like having 2 phones with the power of one.
- Sales of Chinese handsets are increasing rapidly in India. Many of these manufacturers like Xiaomi, Nubia & Gionee allow for multiple parallel accounts within one device.
- Much of the growth of the app corresponds to the time of Reliance Jio’s launch. September 2016. This was when SIM cards were being distributed free/ nearly free and everyone was scrambling for a piece of the action. People needed help with multitasking and managing their multiple identities. By January however people had figured out which of their identities they want to stick with.
Thanks for your time,
Ashish
- Team KG
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You can reach me on ashish@kalagato.com
