MICROMAX PLANS TO DEVELOP ITS OWN CUSTOMIZED FORKED ANDROID OS

Micromax to Customize Forked Android to Target Indian Smartphone Buyers

After Xiaomi and Samsung, it’s now the turn of Micromax to develop its own customized OS keeping Indian consumers in mind. The company also has plans to develop a suite of services and apps that will work across phones, TVs, tablets and wearables to ensure customer engagement and brand loyalty, reported The Economic Times.

The OS will be a forked Android – a platform developed on Google’s open source mobile OS. The new system will be developed under the newly appointed CTO Ashish Agarwal, a former Amazon executive and according to him, it will cater to the needs of Indian consumers like Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi have done internationally through their customized OS.

According to the report, the company’s new forked Android OS will be built by the software team of company in Bengaluru and about 75 people in design teams have been acquired from Nokia’s R&D in Beijing and a second one is coming up in Shenzen will support this venture. They will work together to build the apps ecosystem and partnerships back home.

“The first smartphones with the new OS will be available by the end of this financial year and they will be affordably priced,” Micromax’s co-founder Vikas Jain told the news site.

Micromax like most other companies has also realised that it needs to shift its focus on software. The company believes that it is closer to Indian audiences and has a better understanding of the local market.

“We’re excellent with partnerships and we don’t want to re-invent the wheel,” said Jain adding that instead of starting from the scratch and breaking away completely from Android, the company was working with the globally dominant Android OS to bring a distinct experience to consumers across all platforms, including wearables.

The No 2 handset brand in India, Micromax closed the fiscal 2015 with Rs. 11,000 crores of revenue and sells about 3 million phones a month, two-thirds of which are smartphones, and has a 16.7% share of smartphones and 14.4% share overall devices in the local market as per Counterpoint Research. The company last year had collaborated with Cyanogen and sold phones running CyanogenOS under the Yu brand.