JioPhone could get WhatsApp support

Last month Reliance Jio took the feature phone market by storm, by launching the 4G VoLTE enabled JioPhone for an effective price of Rs. 0 (with a 3-year refundable deposit of Rs 1500). The handset packs Snapdragon 205 chip, bunch of Jio apps, dirt cheap data plans and supports YouTube and Facebook. 

Unfortunately there is no support for WhatsApp and even though Jio, with nearly 125 million subscribers has its own messaging app called JioChat, WhatsApp is to big too ignore, given the fact that it has over 200 million monthly users in the country.

An earlier report suggested that WhatsApp support will be added to JioPhone at a later stage, and now it seems like the talks are on....

According to a report from Factor Daily, Jio and WhatsApp are in early talks to create of version of the messaging app that will work optimally on JioPhone. The report citing sources says “There have been a few meetings between Reliance Jio officials and WhatsApp officials… but the discussions are preliminary,”

The report also mentions that there are technical challenges to bring WhatsApp to JioPhone, as it run KaiOS, a forked version of Firefox operating system, and the OS does not support WhatsApp at the moment. So the app will have to be developed ground up and shed some features, to make it run smoothly on a feature phone.

As of now, it is not known, when JioPhone will get WhatsApp support, but having a version of the popular messaging app, will be a unique selling point for JioPhone, and will help it grow in the market as well.

Kaiser Bey

Kaiser is a tech enthusiast who likes to write, read and talk about tech. He dreams of going to Mars and never come back. We hope that you find his posts on AndroGuider helpful and informative