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A significant shift is coming, there is little doubt about that. But how soon, to what extent, and when to be pragmatic, will define the success and longevity of that shift. If India has to make more iPhones, and there are suggestions Apple intends to shift the entire production load of 60-million US-bound iPhones from China to India, before the end of 2026. Apple hasn’t said anything in this regard, and neither has Foxconn or Tata Electronics. They may very well be a fire as source of this smoke, but for a large part, this seems more of ‘trust me bro’ sources at work. Nevertheless, I asked three simple questions, in an attempt to make sense of it all for our readers. The answers, give us a fair idea of how things are placed.
Employees
- What is the current iPhone production capacity in India, with Foxconn and Tata Electronics, and more to that point, what is the ratio of local consumption versus present exports? At this time, analysts say India’s share of the 232.1 million global iPhone production is between 10% to 20%. It is increasingly annually, but the 2026 deadline may be too aggressive an estimate.
- Have Foxconn and Tata Electronics lined up investments for expansion of production capacity and India, to what extent, and would that be enough for 60 million more iPhones to roll off the production lines? Yes, the stream of investments isn’t slowing down, but whether the capacity can absorb all of the US-bound demand rolling off production lines, remains to be seen.
- What about the sourcing of raw materials, including high value components, such as chips and displays? There is no easy answer for this. High-value components such as displays, chips, still have the world’s production lines relying on China for a steady stream of supplies. That too will change in due course, there is little doubt to the contrary, but to expect a complete shift in a year or two, may well be fallacious.
Analysing Apple’s sharpened focus on India…
FOCUS AND VISION
Vision
More on the point of India as an increasing priority market for tech companies, there is definite momentum which shows no signs of slowing down. As OnePlus founder Pete Lau told me, “smartphone companies should consider building products tailored for the Indian market”. This comes as the company has detailed annual investments of ₹2,000 crore every year until 2027, to strengthen R&D, manufacturing, and service ecosystem in India. The umbrella name — Project Starlight.
There is of course the spectrum of the company’s push into the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, with Lau confirming some products will be launched in the coming months. It is a logical expansion plan, considering smartphone, tablet and wearables portfolios are extensive. TVs and monitors, a market that OnePlus exited a while ago, perhaps needs a revisit at some point — and I say this as someone who always felt OnePlus TVs offered a sort of refinement many competitors didn’t. I fondly remember the OnePlus TV Q2 Pro and the OnePlus Monitor X27 (the latter admittedly a very competitive and crowded space with little to differentiate in features or perceived value).
Amongst reasons for Lau being bullish about India, are examples of features developed in India, which found acceptance in other countries. Case in point, an Intelligent Search feature in OxygenOS, which was subsequently rolled out for users in the US and Europe. There’s also the 5.5G capability they’ve developed in partnership with Jio — this builds on an ability to reconnecting after exiting low-network indoor spaces such as elevators, and switching networks in areas of mobile network congestion.
AI + YOUR PHONE
AI
There is a concerted effort towards making AI more streamlined on a smartphone. Perhaps AI companies took cues from the likes of Google Gemini’s integration within Android or OpenAI’s ChatGPT finding space for itself in Nothing’s AI pursuits (such as the Essential Space suite) quite visible in their recent phones. Finally, Meta AI app is now a thing for Android phones and the iPhone. The toolkit is detailed, as you’d expect for any multimodal model such as Llama 4 that is the foundation in this case — text conversations, voice conversations and image editing, as well as an ability to search the web. For now, voice conversations, Ala Google Gemini Live and ChatGPT Voice Mode, are not available in India. Hopefully soon.
Perplexity now has a WhatsApp bot (there is of course the looming shadow of attempts to find deeper integration in Android phones at some point), which CEO Aravind Srinivas confirms on X, can do Voice Mode, generate memes and videos, do factchecking (which presumably means it can search the web in realtime), and an assistant to manage tasks. For Group Chats, Srinivas says “this one is hard, official API doesn’t support this, we will figure out something here hopefully together with Meta”.
Gemini
One mustn’t forget that just as the previous week was drawing to a close, Google laid out the structure of a two-pronged update for Gemini. One part is about adding AI video generation capabilities usiipadng the Veo 2 model within Gemini, and secondly, Gemini Live getting to understand worldly context if a user enables access to the phone’s camera or shares what’s on the phone’s screen.
WHAT’S ON MY MIND?
We often talk about AI and the conversation, by its very nature, is inclusive for smartphones but ignores feature phone users. There seems to be no clear data, but general estimates peg India’s feature phone user base anywhere between 200 million to 300 million, at this time. The number is declining rapidly, sometime CyberMedia Research’s 2024 India smartphone landscape computations indicate — but it is still a fairly large demographic, one that shouldn’t be ignored. Why am I talking about feature phones?
The reason is, MEGHA (Meghalaya E-Governance Human-centred Assistance), which is an AI-driven citizen support platform, has won first prize at the Kennedy AI for Good Hackathon, organised by Harvard Kennedy School. The idea behind MEGHA is — help citizens with details such as specifics or the documentation required or the process to follow, and access to government schemes, on a basic phone. The tool uses AI to search through official government documentation, and provides answers to user queries, in conversational tonality.
The team behind this includes Manish Maheshwari who is former Head of Twitter India and current Harvard Fellow, Dr. Aarushi Jain, who is Policy Director at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy, Mohammed Y Safirulla K who is an IAS officer and digital governance expert, Manudev Jain who is an IRS officer and Harvard student, as well as IPS officer and Fulbright Scholar Ashish Tiwari.
This is a substantial step forward for building India’s digital governance ecosystem that is easily accessible to citizens and doesn’t block anyone based on lack of access to more expensive tech. It got me thinking, have there been similar initiatives for feature phones and basic mobile phones? There are a few. Kisan e-Mitra is a voice assistant that farmers can use to get guidance on agricultural advice, weather updates, and market prices in local languages via a toll-free IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system. There is also an SMS-based ImTeCHO, or Innovative Mobile-phone Technology for Community Health Operations, meant for Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) to improve maternal, newborn, and child health services in rural areas.
A feature phone or a basic mobile phone may no longer be cool enough for many of us, but it still makes for the backbone of India’s pursuit for complete connectivity.
KNOW
PDF Editor
- If you handle a lot of PDFs on a regular basis, chances are you’d have tried the Foxit PDF Editor at some stage. If you’re still sticking to it (or are willing to give it another try), there’s an update which pretty much implements what we’ve all been thinking. The latest update for the software now adds an ‘AI Tools’ ribbon tab (where you’d mostly find edit, format and other options at the top of the window. This update means quicker access to AI chat, document translation and analysis, and AI bookmark features.
- OpenAI has run into a problem. The AI company has rolled back a couple of changes for the new GPT-4o model, because it had developed a bad personality. Or as Sam Altman explained in a post, the updates “made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying (even though there are some very good parts of it)”. The personality model will get renewed changes in the coming days.
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