Reliance Jio, introduced as a telecom company, has now ventured into various businesses including e-commerce, cloud computing, and others. It is known for pushing 4G adoption in India. Earlier today, at the company’s Annual General Meet (AGM), Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of the group announced a partnership with Google to develop a new type of entry-level Android smartphone.
India’s largest carrier Jio is known for its cheap data rates and its own-branded entry-level JioPhones running KaiOS with support for various popular apps and services.
At the company’s annual meet, it revealed Google’s ₹33,737 crores ($4.5 billion) investment in Jio Platforms Ltd for a 7.73% equity stake. That’s about 45% of ₹75,000 crores ($10 billion) the internet giant announced for “India Digitization Fund” a couple of days back.
With this collaboration, Google will develop an entry-level smartphone for the Indian market, In a blog post, the company notes that this device will feature an optimized Android Operating System and Play Store.
At first look, this program seems to be similar to Android Go. According to the post, the same strategy will be also applied for entry-level 5G smartphone when Jio will deploy the services in the near future.
UP NEXT: Google’s Android graph shows Android 10 has the fastest adoption rate yet
