India is one of the prime markets for smartphone makers. The Indian smartphone market is exponentially growing; hence many international companies are bringing their products here. For the Indian market, the companies make some sorts of customizations in terms of hardware and software, but still the Indian user friendliness of the mobile phones is still doubtful.
Looking at this concern, Indian Government now has put compulsion on mobile phone manufacturers to have Indian Regional language support including Hindi and one regional language as the must-have feature in their upcoming mobiles.
There are some companies like Indus who has been working on native language support within smartphones to attract more people towards the growing culture of smartphones in support for the Digital India mission. The mission aims at the digital literacy of society. Hence, the Indian Government is ensuring that the language should never be a constraint in this mission.
The Department of Telecom (DoT) has released a circular for all the handset manufacturers to include the support for text in English, Hindi, and minimum one more official Indian language. The authority has given a deadline of July 1, 2017, for the same. That mean, the upcoming mobile in India will come pre-loaded with Indian regional language support. In addition, the authority also stated that all mobile phones including the smartphones and feature phones should support reading of the text in 22 Indian languages.
At present, there are many mobile phones that support the regional language. If fact, software companies are also taking initiatives to support the regional language support. A Mumbai-based Indus OS, Baidu, and Hike messenger also released the language support. Recently, WhatsApp also released native language support via update.
The Indus OS is already seen in Micromax mobiles, Celkon mobiles, and Swipe mobiles. Micromax has launched more than 35 smartphones including Unite 4 and Unite 4 Pro having Indus OS which supports 12 Indian language texts. Back in 2003, Indian OEM, Intex introduced the Matrabhasha app which provides an onscreen virtual keyboard including an input for 21 Indian languages.