Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

It seems the Indian government wants to launch an indigenous operating system (OS) for smartphones. 

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has been mooting the idea for a year now, and according to a Business Standard report published this Monday, the ministry is working with academia and startups to develop the IndOS—the tentative name for the project. 

The idea is to challenge the very-hard-to-ignore dominance of Google and its Android OS—believed to have a 96% share of the Indian market. Apple’s iOS is far less pervasive in comparison, but its reach is growing too. Here’s a chart from Statista on how the Indian mobile OS market has evolved:

So yes, a successful IndOS would go a long way towards expanding the limited options available to Indian smartphone users right now. Maybe even the world, if one is feeling aspirational at the moment. 

But just to be clear, this isn’t the first time India is trying to develop operating systems, both for mobile and computer devices. And I think how those projects have turned out hold some important lessons for anyone making a future attempt.

First time as tragedy, the second as farce 

Indian attempts at building an Android and iOS challenger have come from both the private and public sectors. 

In 2016, the Indus OS, a mobile operating system supporting 12 Indian languages, was launched by a Mumbai-based startup. By the following year, it had grown to become the second-most popular OS after Android. Then, the market was flooded by Chinese smartphone brands, most of which came with the Android OS, and Indus OS faded into obscurity. As an operating system, at least, because the startup eventually pivoted to run an app store business. Indus App Bazaar now hosts more than 400,000 applications and was acquired by PhonePe in July last year. 

Just two years after that, in 2018, Reliance Jio took a different approach and bought itself a stake in Hong Kong-based KaiOS, using the operating system for its keypad-based feature phones. Jio claims to have sold 100 million such phones, but it has now partnered with Google and Android for its entry-level 4G smartphone.

Government-funded initiatives haven’t gone anywhere either. 

Take the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). It started working on developing an OS with security as its core USP way back in 2010(!). The current fate of this project is unclear, and there is barely any information on it in the public domain. 

The second, and perhaps more significant, instance of taxpayer-funded OS development is the work being carried out by CDAC.