India wants to develop its own operating system to compete with iOS and Android

Android together with iOS, the big operating systems, dominate the majority of the smartphone market and leave very little room for other alternatives. However, the governments of the great powers want to break this dynamic. Until recently, the proposal of the KylinOS system from China emerged and now it is the turn of India, which is committed to developing their own mobile operating system to compete with Android and iOS.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, explained to The Economic Times that they intend to “ create an indigenous operating system as an alternative to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS”.

India is not the first country that seek to design an alternative proposal to the two predominant systems. Blackberry, Bada, Tizen, Windows Phone, or WebOS failed. And neither do more generic systems like Huawei’s HarmonyOS or Linux-based distributions like the Chinese national system.

As Chandrasekhar explains, they want to invest in creating their own operating system. “ In many ways, there is great interest from MeitY and the Indian government to even create a new operating system for mobile phones. We are talking to people. We are looking for measures for that”, reported the public official.

India’s interest is influenced by the overwhelming growth in mobile usage in the country. The future Indian operating system would be compatible with Android applications and would work on low-end mobiles.

Furthermore, at the close of 2021, the Ministry of Technology itself launched its first indigenous server, Rudra, overseen by the Indian National Supercomputing Center (NSM).

“India is poised to demonstrate that it has the competencies to design, develop, build and deliver the nation’s multidisciplinary computing needs, which are of critical national and strategic importance,” they said during the server launch. With this, it is understood that the Government of the Asian country wants to go further with its own operating system.