India beating China in the world of operating systems
While China has failed to come out with a successful regional operating system, India's indigenous Indus OS has shown phenomenal growth in the last 2 years. Research revealed that Indus OS held "6.3 percent market share" only behind Alphabet's Android. Propelled by Make in India, and with partnerships like Micromax, Celkon and Swipe, India's home-grown OS has been growing by leaps and bounds.
Indus OS is India's multilingual mobile operating system along the lines of Android. It was founded in 2015 by Rakesh Deshmukh, Akash Dongre and Sudheer B. Indus OS was one of the earliest regional Operating System created primarily for the regional language users. Indus OS licensed keyboard provides "word prediction, matra prediction, auto correction and swipe-to-translate & transliterate" innovations to its users.
Indus OS' popularity primarily rests on the fact that it is the first operating system that tries to "make Android friendly to non-smartphone users in rural India". It lays primary emphasis on "user interface and language support". Indus OS maintained that the chief obstacle of an OS in India was complexity, and has been "retooling Android" to help millions of Indians "get online".
Indus OS is funded by angel investors "Mayank Singhal & Hari Padmanabhan from Temasek Holdings; Pranay Chulet, founder of Quikr; Amit Gupta & Naveen Tewari, co-founders of InMobi; Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal, co-founders of Snapdeal".
Indus OS received funds to the tune of $5million in the Series A funding round led by Omidyar Network, the venture capital firm ignited by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam. Indus OS's CEO Rakesh Deshmukh said that he was looking at expanding the team and taking the operating system to more countries. The company had expanded to Bangladesh in 2015.
In May 2016, Indus OS overtook global behemoths of the operating world like iOS, Windows and Cyanogen to rise as the 2nd most popular OS in India. Counterpoint Market Research revealed that Indus OS added 0.5 million OS activations every month and was growing at a whopping 150% rate. 1.4 million of the total 24.8 million smartphone devices sold in India were powered by Indus OS in Q1 FY 2016-17.
