Over the years, many gladiators entered the pit to tackle the supremacy of Android and iOS, only to fall and bite a truckload of sweaty dust. Mozilla tried with Firefox OS and vanished. Jolla experimented with the excellent Sailfish and crashed. Even a rich boi like Microsoft abandoned ship with Windows Phone. India's premier tech institute is now taking a stab with a mobile operating system called BharOS.

The brainchild of smart minds at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, BharOS is built upon the foundation of Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but it won't run Google services like Gmail, Maps, or anything with the ugly G logo, by default. In fact, BharOS rejects the notion of pre-installed apps.

Software updates will be installed automatically, and you will only be able to download properly vetted apps from Private App Store Services (PASS) offered by a business. Essentially, your employer will dictate what apps you can run on the company phone. No naughty deeds, as they say!

Secure apps like Signal for messaging and DuckDuckGo will be available for web browsing. When is it releasing? We don't know. What brands are launching phones with BharOS? We got nada deets.

Here's the press release, if you crave more information, but I'd suggest reading this amazing analysis about the potential (and challenges) of BharOS written by Srinivas Kodali.

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