‘Good Morning’ Messages Slowing Down India’s Smartphones: Report

With millions of “good morning” texts, spiced with colorful images and even videos sent and received every morning across India, one in three smartphone user in India runs out of space daily, as compared to one in 10 in the United States, the media reported.

According to Google, there has been a 10-fold rise in the number of searches for “Good Morning images” over the past five years.

It is because Indians have a habit of sending millions of “good morning!” texts along with sun-dappled flowers, adorable toddlers and birds to friends, family and strangers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 23.

Inexpensive smartphones and data plans have brought an unlikely group of users online who begin their typical day — before sunrise and reaches a crescendo before 8 a.m. — by sending good morning greetings.

“We were trying to deconstruct what is the DNA of a good morning message for months. It’s been a lot of hard work to get it right,” Josh Woodward, the Google product manager in Mountain View, California, was quoted as telling the Wall Street Journal.

Currently, there are nearly 400 million Internet users in India, along with over 300 million smartphone users and about 650 million mobile phone users.

The company used its giant image database and artificial intelligence tools to train the app to weed out good morning messages.

The key to spotting them was looking for a certain size and type of image file, Woodward said, adding that early versions were picking out photos of children wearing T-shirts with words on them.

To counter such storage problem, Google in December launched a new app called “Files Go” that will help free up space, find files faster and share files offline on smartphones that come with less internal storage.

“The average ‘Files Go’ user is saving 1GB of space so they can do more on their phone. It was built for Android Go devices, but we’re also making it available on the Google Play Store,” the company said, at the launch of the product in New Delhi.

The app has more than 10 million downloads so far, with more users in India than any other country. It has cleared up on average more than 1 gigabyte of data per user, Google said. (– IANS)