India-Made Zoom's Competitor JioMeet Amasses Over 1 Million Downloads

When COVID-19 struck, only a few businesses can thrive and Zoom is one of them. However, now, it has to enter a head-on competition with a new app backed by Mukesh Ambani, Indian business magnate.

Reliance Industries got billions of dollars from Intel and Facebook to develop its digital sector and it recently launched JioMeet, an app for video conference. It was made public on Thursday evening and has had more than 10,00,000 downloads ever since.

Much like other conference apps like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, users will have unlimited calls at high-definition quality without the 40-minute time cap of Zoom.

According to JioMeet’s website, all calls are protected by passwords and meetings are encrypted.

The launch of JioMeet follows India’s national ban on several Chinese apps, including UC Web of Alibaba Group and TikTok of ByteDance, citing reasons that these apps threaten the country’s data privacy and security.

On Friday, JioMeet and #MadeinIndia hashtag went viral in India.

This app is the latest project of Reliance Industries, which also owns India’s largest telecom operator. Last Friday, the corporate made public Intel’s investment of $253 million to Jio Platform Ltd.

The chipmaker is the 11^th investors to pour money into Jio, which has raised a total of about 1.2 trillion rupees.

According to Utkarsh Sinha, the managing director of Bexley Advisors, a consultancy company, JioMeet is a real disruption and the fact that it doesn’t limit call time makes it a strong competitor of Zoom.

Jio Platform is fast becoming an ecommerce juggernaut with a diverse portfolio including online payment, retail, and music streaming.

When social distancing becomes widespread to curb the infection of COVID-19, video conference apps have been the lifelines of millions of Indians who are now have to work from home.

JioMeet is introduced amidst accusations against Zoom surfaces, raising question of whether it is siding with China to silence pro-democracy activists.

>>> Long Before Border Conflict, Reliance Jio Has Worked To Prevent Huawei From Infiltrating India's 5G Network