On the Republic Day of India, Let’s Go Through Few Facts About Made in India Mobile Operating Systems:
Indus OS, (formerly known as Firstouch), is an Indian regional-language mobile operating system or home-grown mobile platform built on Android Open Source Project to customize for the Indian audience. Indus OS’ parent OSLabs was founded by 3 IIT Bombay alumni in 2013. Apart from multiple Indian languages, Indus OS also offered users predictive typing and translation between regional languages or English text. The company also made a collaboration with the Government of India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology(MeitY) to introduce text-to-speech technology in regional languages and Aadhaar-authenticated applications for capturing biometric information via built-in scanner on the smartphone. The company has partnered with some smartphone vendors like Samsung, Karbonn, Micromax, Celkon, Swipe, Intex etc. Fintech company PhonePe has acquired OSLabs in July 2022.
Now, BharOS is a new made-in India mobile operating system developed by JandK Operations Private Limited (JandKops), a non-profit organization incubated at IIT Madras. Till now, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS have their pre-installed apps and services to collect data, sometimes without explicitly asking a user. Similarly, other apps from the app store share data with third-party services. BharOS tries to address these issues. BharOS does not come with any such preinstalled services or apps, and hence, is deemed to be more secure and has more privacy standards.
Few reports are saying BharOS is based on the Linux kernel just like Android but independent while most are saying it is a fork of Android Open Source Project. Both are different things.
- iOS, macOS, IBM AIX etc are based on the Unix kernel. Android, Ubuntu, Red Hat etc are based on the Linux kernel. Windows Phone was based on the Windows NT kernel.
- Amazon’ Fire OS, Samsung’s One UI, Oppo’s ColorOs, Huawei’s EMUI etc. are forks of Android Open Source Project. Indus OS falls under this category. As per most reports, BharOS also falls under this category.
In the software world,
“kernel” is a program at the core of an operating system and generally has complete control over everything in the system.
A program is called “fork” – when a developer uses a copy of the source code of a program, application or even an operating system to create a new project based on it. This new project will be different and a piece of software separated from the original and maintained by other people, although it will not be a derivative of the original.
The fact that I know till now is that BharOS comes without any pre-installed apps. I think it’s better to wait till they publish their own official website for more details. Hope it will find a commercial space and will provide benefits to the consumers.
