Indus OS, developed and designed in India, has overtaken global giants such as iOS, Windows and Cyanogen to emerge as the 2nd most popular OS in India as per Counterpoint Market Research. According to this report, Q1 FY 2016-17 saw a total of 24.8 million smartphone devices sold in India, of which 1.4 million devices were powered by Indus OS.
The Indus OS is built on Android and currently supports 12 major regional languages spoken widely in India. According to the company, it is adding close to half million OS activations every month, and growing at a whopping 150% and the company is confident to double this number within 6 months.
Indus OS has been developed to meet the needs of the emerging market’s regional language speaking citizens who are not comfortable with English language. Since the next 300 million users who will use a smartphone for the first time in the next 3 years, will be native language speakers therefore Indus OS is working to create a mobile ecosystem for these users.
Indus OS boasts of a first-ever and complete regional ecosystem, with patented keyboards, auto-correction, matra-prediction features, and transliteration support. App Bazaar, the regional app marketplace for Indus OS, is today, the world’s fastest growing regional marketplace. Over 90% Indus OS users have activated App Bazaar and over 75% users use it on a monthly basis. Today, it has over 25,000 regional language apps on its platform, and allows users to download and pay for apps without any credit cards or email identification, as stated by the company in its press statement.
Indus OS is currently present across 25 handset models. The Government of India has also been a key partner in Indus OS’ growth story. In December 2015, Indus OS collaborated with the Ministry of Communications and IT’s DeitY (Department of Electronics and IT) to introduce text-to-speech technology in regional languages.
Commenting about this achievement, Rakesh Deshmukh, CEO, Indus OS said, “At Indus OS, our aim is to place the power of mobile technology into the hands of the next emerging billion. We have seen an overwhelming response so far – we expect to be on one in every six devices sold in India by 2017, with a total of 100 million customers by 2018.”
