Indus OS – India’s home-grown OS boasts #2 spot

Indus OS, claimed as the world’s First Regional Operating System, conceptualized, 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, 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 indigenous operating system is currently available in 12 Indian languages, adding close to half million OS activations every month, and growing at a whopping 150%; the company expects to double this number within 6 months.

Said Rakesh Deshmukh, CEO, Indus OS, “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.”

Indus OS is addressing one of India’s biggest technological challenges - to develop technology to cater to the economic, social and regional diversity. Less than 10% of the Indian population considers English as their first, second or third language. It is well researched that the next 300 million users who will use a smartphone for the first time in the next 3 years, will be native language speakers, and Indus OS is working to create a mobile ecosystem for these users.

The award-winning platform 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.

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. Indus OS aims to be the vehicle to distribute regional language technologies, and digitally power Indian masses.

“Indus OS is not just a technology product – it’s a mission where government, linguists, tech geeks, mobile brands and thousands of developers are coming together to provide technology to the next billion users,” said Rakesh Deshmukh.
Indus OS recently won the prestigious TiE50 (Silicon Valley) Top Start-Up Award 2016. It was also awarded the prestigious Economic Times Telecom Award 2016 for ‘Innovation in Developing OEM Product’.