Alphabet Inc. might not be battling it out anymore since its defeat but it still wishes to win the bigger battle. The company has plans to launch the economically priced Android One smartphone range again in the Indian market. According to the popular website, the Wall Street Journal, the company will reduce the restrictions it had previously implied on the local manufacturers so that they can come up with better functionalities and also be cost efficient. The tech giant has plans to join hands with Lava International which is an Indian mobile handset firm that will launch the products again in compliance with the recent requirements. Initially the Android One smartphones will be priced at $100, however, the prices for the new smartphones hasn’t been specified as of yet. Previously the company has enforced strict prerequisites along with various other technological demands that caused barriers for the local Indian manufacturers. They claimed that the restrictions that were chalked out were not assisting them in differentiating the smartphones from other manufacturers locally that developed Android One. Moreover, they were forced to buy the smartphone components from particular manufacturers. The local smartphones brand in the Indian market such as Micromax, Spice, and Karbonn where the companies that were considers to be producers of Android One in the Indian back in September 2014. The only difference in the phones was in terms of their design and appearance but the specs were similar and complied to the requirements set by Alphabet. So now the company has raised the bar, thus the manufacturers have now the choice of picking their wide array of suppliers for the devices. Back in times the sales of Android One in India did not really comply with the estimates. Only 1.2 million cellular phone units were sold that was only 3.5% market share when taking cheap mobile phones into consideration priced between $50 - $100. During the same tenure company’s like Xiaomi and Micromax had bigger shares of the same domain which were 7.5% and 8.7% respectively. Micromax was not officially listed to be a part of the Android One venture. The company is optimistic now that the change in strategy will lure manufacturers to come up with better smartphones that are budget friendly which will in return bolster sales. Google Android has already succeeding in becoming the widely used operating system but it is now time that they reign over cheap handsets market as well.
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