Indigenous mobile operating system BharOS: Challenges will start from here, says Ashwini Vaishnaw

Indigenous mobile operating system BharOS: Embarking on self-sufficiency in the mobile operating system (OS), Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Union Minister for Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw test BharOS on Tuesday calling it a start of a long journey towards developing an indigenous operating system. ‘BharOS’ has been developed by an IIT Madras-incubated firm. Sharing his experience, Vaishnaw suggested that adding ‘a’ will make it ‘BharOSA’, which means trust. 

“There will be difficulties in this journey and there are many people around the world who will bring difficulties and will not want any such system to be successful…,” Vaishnaw said.

BharOS can be installed on commercial off-the-shelf handsets. Organisations having stringent privacy and security requirements or those users handling sensitive information that requires confidential communications on restricted apps on mobiles are currently being provided with this system. In order to use it, such users will need access to private cloud services through private 5G networks.

JandK Operations Private Limited (JandKops), which has been incubated at IIT Madras, has developed the BharOS. 

“BharOS Service is a Mobile Operating System built on a foundation of trust, with a focus on providing users more freedom, control, and flexibility to choose and use only the apps that fit their needs,”  said IIT Madras director V Kamakoti.

“This innovative system promises to revolutionise the way users think about security and privacy on their mobile devices,? he said.

One of the important features of BharOS is that it comes with No Default Apps (NDA). This simply means users will be free to use apps of their own choice and will not be forced to use apps that they may not be familiar with. This will give more authority to users who can choose to give permissions to apps they trust.

BharOS offers ‘Native Over The Air’ (NOTA) updates that can help to keep the devices secure. For the ease of users, NOTA updates will be downloaded automatically and installed on the device. This will make sure that the device will always run on the latest version of the operating system. Also, BharOS provides access to trusted apps from organisation-specific Private App Store Services (PASS).

A PASS provides access to a curated list of apps that have been thoroughly vetted and have met certain security and privacy standards of organisations.

With PTI Inputs