Will India end up replacing iOS/Android smartphones?
The days of the smartphone industry being defined by iOS and Android are numbered.
The cold facts are that geopolitical realities mean many nations, particularly in the Global South, now seek an alternative to the hegemonic control those US systems wield.
What do you expect to happen as the link between nations and collective beliefs erode?
Some alternatives already exist.
Huawei’s Harmony OS is likely to see more abundant availability in China, while Linux-based systems like Sailfish or Ubuntu may gain support. That support’s going to consist of some of the brightest minds in developing economies seeking to improve and enhance what those operating systems can do.
Where are we going? We don’t know
There’s no telling yet what the philosophies driving such development might be.
Will those operating systems be about privacy, will they cater for data security? Will they simply exist to provide support for concepts like sovereign data? To what extent will they become a parallel system of digital reality that only intermittently engages with the digital status quo? A kind of hybrid connectivity in which platforms only integrate as necessary, and even then subject to heavy encryption?
I don’t know and can’t really speculate on the answers to some of the above but will note that the seeming collapse of liberalism means some of the concepts of current smartphone existence (denial of surveillance, for example) may not make the cut in emerging realities likely to be dominated by different economic blocs with different ideological approaches.
India is entering the prime manufacturing race
The one more thing to this is that it is quite plausible to think that these new operating system paradigms will come out of India, given the government there is now preparing to invest in the creation of its own Indian brands of smartphone.
“Now that we have a very substantial electronics ecosystem in our country, this is the time when we will be going for getting our own Indian brands in mobile phones,” the India’s IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, said, speaking at Davos.
“Very soon, maybe another one year from now, or maybe max 18 months from now, we should have our own Indian brands coming out.”
Will an Indian Apple, Indian Google, even an Indian Huawei eventually emerge as the third wheel in smartphone evolution?
We shall see, I suppose.
Though, given the pace of change, we may not even need to wait that long.
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