The average selling price of a smartphone in India is just $132, half that of China, so the market for low-end smartphones is brisk. On top of that, there are many languages spoken in india, and support for them in Google’s Android and iOS is limited. This created an opening for an Indus OS, which has its own app store with 30,000 Android apps, most available in two or more local languages. Its installed based is currently around 4 million.
It is obvious that IndusOS is really just a modified Android skin like ColorOS or Touchwiz. They have added their own app store and some localisation.
Edited 2016-08-16 00:07 UTC
Please define “average” and “smartphone” since this is getting tricky. At that price you get for example a Samsung J3g or a J3Pro in Sweden at the local store. Median indian does not have enough food for the day and barely shelter over his head at night so talking about averages in a country with 1200+million people seems VERY insensitive as you HAVE to know that we are not talking about averages.
On the other hand, the indian government is very socialist and has in the past been prone to price fixing. So who knows.
There is no need to define average, is a basic math term and a statistical tool. As for “what is a smartphone”, running Android should suffice.
On the other hand, a more apt question would be if that price counts any carrier subsidy or not.
4 million = 5%, so total smartphone market = 80 million. India has about 1.2 billion people officially and 1.7 billion unofficialy so you can see that India doesn’t have a high smartphone penetration.
True story, not meant to be representative for all of India!: When I was backpacking in India 5 years ago I travelled with a local guy that left his village to go into town to buy a “smart”phone. He would be the only one in his village to have such a device so when I asked him why he wanted to get one he answered “to get a wife”. He was planning on buying a 20 dollar feature phone with money that he had saved for the last 3 months
5 years is ancient history for smartphones, be it in India or even Europe.
A quick Google search reveals the estimation for this year is India having over 200 million smartphone users http://www.statista.com/statistics/467163/forecast-of-smartphone-us…
Also, from that search I learned “sub-$75 smarphones” is a thing in India, compared to that the $132 average talked in the article is almost double in price.
Please don’t mix my personal story from 5 years ago with the actual 5% and 4 million numbers that come from this article and point to 80 million smartphones. I don’t know why those numbers contradict so much with the 200 million number that you provided. Having sub-$75 smartphones while having a $132 average is totally possible though. 1 $700 flagship would cancel out about 10 $75 smartphones. A quick search for “Android 6 smartphone” shows a $50 dollar smartphone available right here in The Netherlands.
I just googled “how many smartphones are in india”…
Still, the article is fishy (think how it first the Android-based OS was written from scratch) and the company is fishy (their website changed from some educational software to the smartphone OS a few months ago, their Wikipedia page looks like a self-written ad and such)
Dude, the article talks about 4m ACTIVATED smartphones. Yet there indeed must be more to that since doubts are valid that lesser then half of all smartphones are activated.
-if popular- would allow OS houses to focus at what matters.
Those regional derivatives could also handle legislation, privacy-agenda, licensing…