
Google for India: Building India-first products and features - jpatokal
https://www.blog.google/topics/next-billion-users/building-india-first-products-and-features/
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viswanathk
Data in India is really cheap. You pay <$7 for 30GB of data and the speed is
not bad at all (about 20-30Mbps)!

~~~
sharpercoder
Is this country-wide or only at limited areas?

~~~
metahost
The prices posted by OP seem to be referring to the carrier Reliance Jio.
Their network speeds were great initially(20-30mbps when other carriers we're
hardly at 5-10mbps). The speeds have deteriorated significantly now. The
network seems to be reeling under the load of it's huge user base.

~~~
eklavya
It depends on the area, I have used it in multiple cities and except one
location (problem with all networks there) all else was good. There is an
option in the jio app to register complaint about slow network, I have had
some luck with that.

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gnufied
I am wondering how does one uses Google maps while driving a two wheeler. I
have driven a Yamaha in India for years and juggling a phone definitely seems
risky.

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godzilla82
Get a snug helmet and put your phone inside against your cheek!

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shripadk
Or just use earphones maybe?

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krisgenre
Tez had excellent marketing. Every time you referred a friend, you and your
friend got Rs. 51 (less than $1). Every time you transacted (some min. amount)
they gave out scratch cards. In my circle even those who were skeptical
initially gave in to the temptation.

~~~
kkarakk
that's not excellent for india, that's standard. nearly every service over
there gives out free money as standard SOP since indians love deals. did i say
love? i meant they will literally use your service even if it never delivers
75percent of the time as long as you give them a good deal. they'll complain
but they'll use it. however also demonstrated that indian users will jump shit
asap to the competitor offering the better deal so retention is really really
really hard in india

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thisisit
> And Indians are using more data than ever before—4GB on average every month,
> projected to grow to 11GB per month in the next four years. Cheaper data
> through carrier innovation and greater access to public WiFi such as Google
> Station makes the richness of the internet more accessible to Indians.

This has to be the worst PR news from Google I have ever read. For one, taking
credit for something they have not delivered. Anyone and everyone in India
will tell you the whole thing has to do with Reliance Jio and not much to do
with Google wifi at all. Though given the cost of spectrum in India it remains
to be seen if the data plans remain cheap. They have already increased from
309 for 3 months to 459 for 3 months ie more than 48% increase (surprisingly
plans are still cheap compared to the old plans).

Then it talks about Android Go, even though there is a full fledged release
page. Tez already exists with it's own PR page.

So, the only two things are:

> The Google Assistant for the JioPhone

Even after reading twice I don't understand what is special about this other
than the carrier branding.

> Two-wheeler mode in Google Maps comes to India first

This looks promising though with even bigger risk than the general maps. So
kudos, I guess?

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dingo_bat
I can't say about the other stuff but tez is surprisingly awesome. Tez + UPI +
Adhaar just blows away everything I've seen. This has potential to cut out the
cc middlemen completely.

~~~
piyush_soni
I' have to agree. UPI (Tez/BHIM etc.) is so awesome and a pleasure to use, I
don't even like credit card payments anymore. Wonder why the USA doesn't have
anything like that.

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nindalf
I'm curious, have you never seen failures happen? I've seen it happen a few
times - a payment to a merchant times out and they don't receive it till days
later. By then you've already paid twice and its difficult to recover the
money. This isn't a problem with credit cards where you can simply issue a
charge-back. Until UPI has a grievance redress system, it will struggle to
gain mainstream acceptance.

That's not the only issue. Operating this system isn't free. For now, no
transaction fees are being levied but banks are eagerly awaiting the day that
the RBI will allow them to. 1-2% of a txn might not seem like much, but it'd
be a tough sell to consumers asking them to pay more when they could use cash
instead.

~~~
piyush_soni
I've made numerous (at least more than 100) UPI transactions, but haven't seen
a single 'failure' as such. Yes, there's been delay at times, but it's just
that, a delay. It's a little inconvenience at that time, but it's
comparatively much rarer (and less frustrating) than OTP SMS not received
problem for a credit card transaction which I just started hating. Most of the
times, UPI (Tez) transactions are instant for me.

About 1-2% charges, if they ever start using it, wouldn't it still be better
than credit cards? Most merchants don't charge extra for those (but some do
even for credit cards).

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TheAdamAndChe
This is a smart move for Google. There's a large market in India that isn't
being used by them currently, so if they can catch that market, they'll
definitely benefit from it.

I do find it interesting, though, that "India-first" features are being
praised by most here, while "America-first" features would probably be looked
down upon by most here as well. What do you think causes the different
reactions between the two?

~~~
maged
Literally every other Google product is America-first, just no need to market
it as such.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
If there's no need to market a product as America-first, then why is there a
need to market these as India-first? Like they said in the article, the
products made won't just help India.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Because Google is trying to build the monopoly they have in America in India
as well. They are specifically targeting the market they hope to gain capture
in.

A lot of users may prefer a locally-branded competitor because they feel it is
properly tailored to their needs and culture. (I've specifically heard Yandex
understands the interests and needs of Russian-speaking users better than
Google, which is not a shock.) Presumably, specifying "India-first" is
intended to convey that these apps are developed specifically for Indian users
and their needs.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
> Presumably, specifying "India-first" is intended to convey that these apps
> are developed specifically for Indian users and their needs.

Oh, I understand this completely. It makes perfect sense for Google to focus
on an emerging market to become a monopoly there, and I feel it's a fantastic
strategy.

What I'm more curious about is why an Indian-first focus is met with fanfare
and acceptance, while an American-first focus is met with derision and
contempt against something anti-globalist, and that these two opinions often
come from the same group of people. I just find it an interesting dichotomy.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Presumably the same way saying you're a "women's rights activist" makes you
fighting for a good cause and saying you're a "men's rights activist" makes
you a sexist, and saying "black lives matter" is fighting for a good cause,
but saying "white lives matter" makes you a Nazi.

The language is preloaded with a lot of existing conceptions about the state
of the world currently, and the sort of people who use each set of terms.

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dingdongding
Remember Android One program? Google has commitment issues to their
products/programs

~~~
nkskalyan
Mi A1 was released in September
[http://www.mi.com/in/mi-a1/](http://www.mi.com/in/mi-a1/)

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neya
> Google Go, a new app from Google Search

Sigh. Why do they pollute/confuse their existing products/projects? Go (Lang)
was already difficult enough to search for on Google.

~~~
reeteshv
Maybe, because the average Indian user has nothing to do with the programming
language. However, s/he understands the word Go even if s/he is illiterate?

~~~
netheril96
And the average Indian users will be confused even more than developers, when
they search for "Google Go" only to receive results about Go language.

~~~
enitihas
I don't think so. I frequently search for golang related issues, but even then
when I search for 'Google go', the golang website is on number 6 and has no
other mention on the first page at all. It is the programming language which
suffers from poor discover ability. For an average non programming indian,
golang might not feature on the first page at all.

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wruza
Sometimes I think twice before naming our company’s projects since one may do
it one day. My observation from news is that first letter is fundamental; I
wouldn’t name anything starting with G. Google is world brand indeed, but the
name itself feels so ugl^W unnatural to me. Now they’re locked into that Goo-
gl thing.

Why do brands reuse naming schemes for new projects? If you can do the best,
integrate and adrertise, isn’t it better to drop pr weight and start over with
completely new names?

~~~
technofiend
Are you saying you're having trouble distinguishing between Google Great,
Google Good, Google Gumballs and Google Great GoogleyMoogley? I thought the
differences were obvious! /s

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dmitriid
> Tez has processed over 140 million transactions from nearly 12 million
> active users. There are more than 525,000 merchants already on Tez, using it
> to take payments, pay their suppliers or transfer money to employees.

Add to that the insane scale of AliBaba (with AliExpress) and WeChat who
together process over a trillion dollars yearly. India and South-East Asia
have an insane number of people.

Not to beat a yet-alive horse, I'd love to see bitcoin (and other
cryptocurrency) proponents tell the world how they are going to deal with
_that_.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
> I'd love to see bitcoin (and other cryptocurrency) proponents tell the world
> how they are going to deal with that.

The price of cryptocurrencies are a function of supply and demand. A very
large number of people wanting to get bitcoins combined with a limited number
of bitcoins means the price would go up.

~~~
dmitriid
I’m not talking about price. I’m talking about scale

~~~
kkarakk
crypto scales with need - the number of nodes are increased and the blockchain
balloons in size to keep up, just like regular banking transactions do. plus
the core devs are very aware of scaling issues - since it's mentioned every
time financial crypto is brought up

hardware is cheap, why would crypto scaling be an issue?

~~~
dmitriid
> hardware is cheap, why would crypto scaling be an issue?

Because the algorithms governing crypto may not be scalable.

Case in point: a simple game of CryptoKittens basically crippled Ethereum:

\- Etherscan has reported a sixfold increase in pending transactions on
Ethereum since the game's release, by the Axiom Zen innovation studio, on 28
November

\- CryptoKitties has become so popular that it's taking up a significant
amount of available space for transactions on the Ethereum platform

\- the CryptoKitties game accounts for over 10% of network traffic on
Ethereum. As traffic increases, transactions become more expensive to execute
quickly.

All this for a number of transactions that wouldn't even register on the radar
of ... well ... any of the "more traditional" paying systems (including the
pay apps like Tez, AliPay, WeChat etc.)

