Indian Origin Indus Trounces Apple and Microsoft in Smartphone OS Market
BENGALURU: In past few years, India has become a gold mine for smartphone companies, and looking at the stats produced by various research organizations, the gold-rush doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. In January, 2016, India’s mobile phone subscriber base crested the 1 billion mark, as per data released recently by the country’s telecom regulator. Although, a proud feat for any country, the prevalent English language based Operating Systems (OS) are becoming a bottleneck for the Indian population, majority of which doesn’t know English.
To keep accelerating the country’s trajectory in the mobile driven world, Mumbai based Indus OS has come into the picture to fill this gap by creating world's first completely regional OS. It has already left Apple iOS and Microsoft behind, taking the second spot in the Indian smartphone operating system market, as reported by businessinsider. With its success, Indus has added yet another feather in the cap of the Central government's Make in India as well as the Digital India initiatives.
Indus OS’ journey started with Micromax smartphones about nine months ago. Now, noticing the increasing demand of its vernacular OS, “We're accumulating nearly half million activations every month,” says Indus OS CEO, Rakesh Deshmukh, to businessinsider. The software company aims to add 100 million customers by 2018.
According to a research done by Counterpoint Research in association with Economic Times, Indus OS captured a massive 5.6 percent share in the total smartphone market in the first quarter of 2016, while Apple's iOS stands at number 5th with gross 2.5 percent. On the other hand, Microsoft's Windows is sharing position number 7th with Samsung's Tizen OS izen OS which had a share of only 0.3 percent.
The OS has a regional keyboard that supports 12 languages; also capable of translating messages written in a local language to English with a left swipe and transliterating it when swiping right. It is the world's first smartphone platform to provide transliteration functionality in Urdu, which is read from right to left, reports ScoopWhoop. It also has a local application called App Bazaar, which allows users to download apps in native languages, without requiring them to use email IDs or paying by credit cards. “Over 90 percent of the users have downloaded App Bazaar and 75 percent among them use it on a monthly basis,” Deshmukh extols. While talking about company’s expansion plan he added that they are in advance stages of discussion with two other handset brands to partner for the local language based OS.
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