A vernacular social media app is a social app in which people post, share and chat in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and other Indian languages. "Vernacular" means the language that people use at home. Such apps are also called Indian-language social networks. They are paid for mainly by ads in the feed and by virtual gifts.
Why do these apps exist, when global social apps are available? Because many Indians came online on cheap phones and read and write mainly in their own language. Global apps were built for English first. A vernacular app is built for the other users from the start. Its menus, its keyboard and its feed are all in the user's language. This is explained in vernacular internet.
Consider a retired schoolteacher in Jodhpur. She opens the app and chooses Hindi. Her feed fills with morning greeting cards, devotional songs, recipes and news from Rajasthan. She records a short Rajasthani folk song and posts it. She does not type her caption in the Hindi script. She types it in English letters, and the app's keyboard converts it into Hindi. This is called transliteration. She can also say her caption aloud, and the app converts her speech into text.
Who sees her song? A recommendation system decides. It first shows the post to a small number of Hindi users who like folk music. If many of them listen to the end, like it or share it on WhatsApp, the app shows it to more people. A post in Tamil is ranked mainly among Tamil users. So the app runs a separate feed for each language, with its own trends.
The app earns money in two main ways. The first is ads between posts. An advertiser's demand-side platform (DSP) bids for each ad space in the feed, and a mobile ad network can fill spaces with ads from many advertisers. The second is gifts. In a live chat room, users buy coins with real money and send them to the host as gifts. Say a user buys 100 coins for ₹100 and sends a gift worth 50 coins. The host earns part of the value of that gift, and the app keeps the rest. This is explained in virtual currency.
A social app must also deal with harmful posts and fake accounts. Users can report a post or an account. Each report goes to the app's trust and safety investigation team. Under India's IT Rules 2021, the app must have a grievance officer who receives users' complaints and decides on them within set time limits.
Some vernacular apps also run a separate short-video app, with the same languages and many of the same users.