Indus OS partners with Celkon and Swipe, no more exclusive to Micromax

NEW DELHI: Indigenous regional-language mobile operating system Indus OS today announced partnerships with two Indian smartphone brands – Celkon and Swipe. This means that the OS will be available in upcoming Celkon and Swipe smartphones, in addition to being on Micromax devices.

Created by a Mumbai-based startup of the same name (formerly known as Firstouch), Indus OS is claimed to be the second-largest smartphone operating system in India by Counterpoint Research. It’s even more popular than Apple’s iOS in the country.


Recently, the company launched the updated Indus OS 2.0 with Micromax’s Unite 4 series,

The first Celkon device to come with Indus OS, Campus PRIDE will be launched by August 2016. With a strong focus on innovation, this partnership will soon bring Indus OS’ patented features to Swipe’s range of smartphones as well.

“Lack of localization and multilingual support is an important barrier for industry to overcome and the new category of smartphones with deeper integration and customization to support multiple native languages, will lead to an inflection point in Indian smartphone adoption and empower individuals with smartphones, and hence Internet in their hands,” said Tarun Pathak, senior telecom analyst at Counterpoint Research.

The company claims to have gotten 3 million users onboard within just 9 months, and has partnered with the government to introduce text-to-speech technology in regional languages. Indus takes pride in being the “world’s first regional operating system”.

According to data from Counterpoint Research with ET, Indus OS had a 5.6% share in the smartphone market during January-March, ahead of Apple's iOS which had 2.5% share and Microsoft's Windows which had a share of 0.3% — same as Samsung's Tizen OS.

Indus OS was launched in May late year with Micromax’s Unite 3 handset. The company is targeting to be on 1 in every 6 smartphone devices in the country by 2017.