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It's a year since the launch of India's homegrown mobile OS called BharOS. What's up with it?
"If a manufacturer decides to work with us and build a phone from scratch with BharOS, we can roll it out in three months," insists Karthik Ayyar
When I wrote about 'Why the odds are stacked against BharOS' last March, I was skeptical over claims that this mobile operating system (OS) could make the cut and compete with the might of Google’s Android OS. The question was simple: Can a homegrown mobile OS, developed by a startup with no app store, be able to compete in India where even Apple’s iOS has less than 4% market share, and the dominant player is Google’s Android OS with an imposing 96% share?
What also did not help was a skeletal website and lack of details. This January, I happened to bump into Karthik Ayyar at the India Science Festival (ISF) held in Pune. I requested him for an update, half expecting a positive response, but he immediately agreed and was surprisingly candid about the developments. So, here are excerpts from the chat I had with the maker of BharOS, or BharatOS, who now operates from Kodaikanal, a hill town in Tamil Nadu.
Pix shot by Leslie D’Monte: Karthik Ayyar, Founder of JandK Ops, maker of BharOS
"For the last 15 years, I have been surrounded by more animals than humans," says Ayyar, who has always remained abreast of technology. A BS in computer science from the University of Minnesota, Ayyar founded OOPS Pvt. Ltd, and partnered with IIT-Madras to develop India’s first video-conferencing over internet in 1997-98. Around 2005, he started living in Kodaikanal, a hill town in Tamil Nadu, and five years later, developed a long-range wifi to connect his remote home with BSNL’s fibre network.
Ayyar later worked with BSNL’s Tamil Nadu circle to provide the same solution to other residents in Kodaikanal. All along, he also contributed to open source. His contributions related to secure communication are widely deployed as part of the OpenWrt project—a Linux operating system used on embedded devices.
Around 2017-18, Ayyar began thinking about how Android started out as an open platform but how big tech companies were now "kind of slowly taking over our lives". "I don't deny the benefits, but the amount of data being captured is disproportionate to the number of benefits. I realised this as a problem that's not going to disappear—it's only going to get worse. And that it's not just about data privacy but also about data security... People will say that it's the algorithms that are making the decisions and not humans, so you cannot sue us, or hold us liable for (mistakes). We are today living in an age where if you lose your mobile phone, your digital identity is gone," he says.
Ayyar spoke with a few of his close friends and decided that this problem was worth addressing. He founded JandK Operations Pvt. Ltd (nothing to do with Jammu & Kashmir—rather, the 'J' stands for January, the month Ayyar was born, and 'K' for Karthik) and registered the startup in Chennai in January 2022. JandK was incubated at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras’s (IIT-M) Pravartak Technologies Foundation, which is funded by the Indian government’s department of science and technology. JandK is the maker of BharOS.
Ayyar admits that when he announced BharOS to the world last year, "we were ready, but we didn't really expect what would happen". The philosophy behind it, he explains, was simply that an OS should just be an enabler of apps. "You can think of it as buying a home with no furniture, and with no fittings. You should get to decide what furniture you want to design, and what furniture you want. But today, your digital house (referring to the mobile phone) makes you live with digital strangers (mobile apps) and they're watching what you're doing all the time," he explains.
BharOS has only used an Android type interface while putting in a lot more underlying work, according to Ayyar. “New things like the Root of Trust (the foundation on which all secure operations of a computing system depend) and Chain of Trust (verification method to ensure security and integrity) were added, which is not there in conventional Android forks,” he explains. Ayyar adds that software updates will ensure that the device is always running the latest version of the operating system and it has the latest security patches and bug fixes. Ayyar came up with a mechanism called 'pass' on a private appstore service, the idea being that it will be for someone you trust.
Further, given that Android is based on the Linux kernel (an OS meant primarily for mobile devices, Android is crafted on a modified Linux kernel and uses other open-source software too), Ayyar and his friends explored how Android was being sold. "Technically, we utilised features of the Linux kernel to basically provide this level of protection. In a sense, you can call it containerization of sorts, similar to what Docker (an operating system for containers that are standard units of software that package up code, enabling the application to run quickly and reliably) has done for servers," he explains.
Further, Ayyar realised the need for users to have a familiar user interface, user experience, and Android app compatibility "because people do not like to change their habits overnight". "Hence, we used the Android stack where it made sense, and also have some of our code above the Linux kernel. We'd like to be known as a Linux distribution with Android compatibility," he insists.
According to Ayyar, BharOS will have only "three or four " pre-installed apps, and some apps that users may want, such as "WhatsApp, a browser, maps, and maybe music since I listen to Spotify". Ayyar believes that 8-10 apps is all he needs to do "about 90%" of all his tasks. "And just delete them when you do not require them," he advises, the point being that you "choose what to install and you choose what to remove".
Why is this important? According to Ayyar, India consumes about 120 million mobiles a year, of which about 90 million are basically phones made by China. They may be assembled in India, but the design and the software that run on the phone are from China. He adds that the challenge is that people may need to have a second phone just to maintain their privacy and security. He acknowledges, though, that it's not simple to buy a second phone and install BharOS since "the keys to unlock those phones are held by Google and the phone manufacturers", and it's not advisable to do (what is technically known as 'rooting') because it voids the manufacturer's warranty and compromises security.
Just when things were getting better
Allegations surfaced in October 2023 that BharOS is a fork of GrapheneOS—a privacy and security-focused Android-compatible OS. The claims were made first by a group known as 'Tech and Leaks’, following a source code leak of BharOS after its GitHub repository was made public. “But if you look clearly in the leaked repos, BharOS is literally a FORK of GrapheneOS with some added commits. Things forked from GrapheneOS to indigenously develop BharOS include Settings App, Camera App, Frameworks Base, Platform, Manifest, Setup Wizard, Updater, etc.,” the group said on its Telegram channel. IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation, which incubated the BharOS parent company, declined any association between the GrapheneOS fork and BharOS.
GrapheneOS is an Android-compatible mobile OS with a special focus on privacy and security. It was publicly released in 2019 (earlier in 2014 as CopperheadOS). It is an Android-based custom OS that offers additional guardrails and improves the overall permission model. GrapheneOS offers several built-in apps including Vanadium WebViewer and browser, and a camera app called Secure Camera. When the 'Tech and Leaks’ group alleged that BharOS was a fork of GrapheneOS, it basically meant that the former was built by making changes/modifications to the existing project. A common practice, forking is done either to propose changes to an existing software project or to use someone else’s project as a starting point for an individual idea.
In a tweet, the IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation identified the alleged fork as originating from a Chennai-based software company named Megam Solutions. “This fork has nothing to do with BharOS or our incubated company, JandKOps. On investigation, we found that one of the engineers in #Megam wanted to try out a port of android and he used the name BharOS unintentionally,” it said in the tweet.
"I am more than happy and willing to sit with anyone on any public forum and discuss the technical merits of it. That incident kind of set us back since now I not only have to sell the OS but also have to explain to people that we were not at fault. And while they (Megam) have publicly apologised, the scary thing is we don't know whether they have actually sold or commercialised the product. We have applied for the trademark but the process is a long one."
Similar efforts
Ayyar's attempt is not entirely new. In 2013, a group of IIT graduates developed Indus OS, a multilingual Android fork. An Android fork is a legally modified version of Android built on Google’s Android Open Source Project (AOSP). It allows any handset maker or developer to build a custom version of Android without having to pay any license fee to Google or pre-install any of its apps. A forked Android operating system, however, cannot access Google’s Play Store.
India also has a couple of locally built desktop operating systems. The Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) Linux was developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Chennai. C-DAC is an R&D organization of the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY). Then, there is PrimeOS, meant for laptops targeted at students. PrimeOS, also based on AOSP, cannot access Google Play and so has built its own app store with “more than 10,000 fully compatible apps that are specially designed for students”.
So, what’s the roadmap for BharOS?
"We have been focusing primarily and working with strategy agencies, because they have a need for secure communication, but I cannot name those agencies because they are all in national interest. They have evaluated our technology and, in some cases, been testing it and trying to crack into it to test the security and privacy of the system (BharOS)," says Ayyar.
Of course, BharOS is being restricted to clients like security agencies "for the simple reason that we don't have the kind of ecosystem to build a phone from scratch and have a central app store", rues Ayyar. As for companies that do have the capability of building local phones (and not just assembling them), Ayyar admits it will "require a certain level of business commitment... since in terms of economics, a phone with no OS may not provide return on investment on the BOM (bill of material) cost".
According to him, "the BOM cost for a mobile phone in India for a 4G mobile phone is somewhere around $85, while it's around $130 for a 5G handset, but to get entry into this club, you need to make at least a million phones. So, you're looking at a project size of about $200 million".
The question, he says, thus boils down to who in India has "the courage to bet $200 million on a math guy who lives in the forest?" Ayyar, meanwhile, continues to evangelize as many people as possible. He says everyone's receptive to his idea but are hesitant to take risks due to the economics. "If a manufacturer decides to work with us and build a phone from scratch with BharOS, we can roll it out in three months," Ayyar concludes.
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