It seems the Indian government wants to launch an indigenous operating system (OS) for smartphones. (View Highlight)
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has been mooting the idea for a year now, and according to a Business Standard report published this Monday, the ministry is working with academia and startups to develop the IndOS —the tentative name for the project. (View Highlight)
In 2016, the Indus OS, a mobile operating system supporting 12 Indian languages, was launched by a Mumbai-based startup. By the following year, it had grown to become the second-most popular OS after Android. Then, the market was flooded by Chinese smartphone brands, most of which came with the Android OS, and Indus OS faded into obscurity. As an operating system, at least, because the startup eventually pivoted to run an app store business. Indus App Bazaar now hosts more than 400,000 applications and was acquired by PhonePe in July last year. (View Highlight)
Just two years after that, in 2018, Reliance Jio took a different approach and bought itself a stake in Hong Kong-based KaiOS, using the operating system for its keypad-based feature phones. Jio claims to have sold 100 million such phones, but it has now partnered with Google and Android for its entry-level 4G smartphone. (View Highlight)
The second, and perhaps more significant, instance of taxpayer-funded OS development is the work being carried out by CDAC. The MeitY-funded Centre for Development of Advanced Computing has been working on the BOSS operating system (for Bharat Operating System Solutions) since 2007. According to people close to MeitY, the OS is being used by the Indian Navy, and a few other government agencies. (View Highlight)
Indus OS failed because it targeted the lower end of the smartphone spectrum but couldn’t survive the influx of Chinese smartphones which now dominate the segment. The higher end of smartphone users, however, will clearly want an experience similar to what’s provided by Android-powered Samsung or iOS-powered Apple devices. (View Highlight)
Meanwhile, Chinese telecom giant Huawei has also been working on its own operating system since 2016—the HarmonyOS, which it announced in 2019. Now, Harmony isn’t entirely; it is based on Android Fork. But over the years, the Chinese company has built a suite of applications it calls Huawei Mobile Services (HMS). Akin to the GMS. (View Highlight)
