Adamu Garba who swears by President Muhammadu Buhari, says his Crowwe app wasn't taken off Google's Play Store because it had been at the receiving end of a raft of unsavoury, bad reviews from social media users.
After the Buhari-led federal government suspended the operations of Twitter in Nigeria on Friday, June 4, 2021, Garba was one of the APC members who backed the controversial decision on social media.
Afterwards, a slew of social media users rushed to Google Play Store to hand Adamu's Crowwe some of the most uncomplimentary, brutal reviews ever posted.
Most of the president's critics described the app as the worst thing they've ever used.
On Monday, June 14, some Twitter users noticed that Crowwe, a microblogging platform that mimics Twitter, was no longer on Google's Play Store, prompting insinuations that it had been taken down by Google because of the plethora of bad reviews.
However, Garba, who filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Twitter's Jack Dorsey in the wake of the #EndSARS protests against police brutality in 2020, says Crowwe was taken down to fix a technical glitch and would be back up in the next couple of hours.
“We took down Crowwe app because we are trying to update the codes and then put it back up.
"There are some bugs which we identified which can prevent future downloads so we decided to bring it down, edit the code and then put it back up," Garba tells Punch newspaper.
He denies that the bad reviews targeted at his app were to blame.
“Yes, a lot of people have been posting reports but it has no effect on the app. The truth is that before you publish an app, you have to pass through a lot of audits and a lot of these people commenting don’t know.
“The app being installed has nothing to do with the user but has everything to do with the app itself.
"There is a bug affecting the contact list information so we had to submit a support report to take it down which was done.
"We are almost done with the publishing and we will push it back and it might be installed tonight or tomorrow morning,” Garba, a former presidential aspirant, adds.
The federal government's ban of Twitter has been roundly condemned locally and internationally as a suppression of free speech and a descent into dictatorship.