Reliance Jio's cloud storage offer could undercut Google One and iCloud pricing
Reliance Jio's 100GB free cloud storage offer could challenge Google One and iCloud's dominance among Android and Apple phone users in India, something which Dropbox and Microsoft's OneDrive haven't been able to do as yet, experts said.
The competition could also nudge these players to lower their pricing — Google One (100GB at ₹130), iCloud (50GB at ₹75) — a trend emerging as Indian players like Ola, and MapMyIndia, challenge the large Western counterparts like Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft's Azure, Google etc.
«Jio has brought a very lucrative proposition for an average phone user in India who struggles to upgrade memory because of paid storage,» said Neil Shah, founding partner of technology consulting firm Counterpoint Research. «But, bundling of products and services with the OS ecosystem is a key challenge here.»
For instance, WhatsApp or the majority of app data is currently backed up in iCloud and Google One. «There has to be some push for the policy side as well to make the tech ecosystem a level-playing field. The Competition Commission of India is looking into these matters,» Shah said.
Jio's strategy goes beyond data storage.
«Adoption of the Jio Cloud will enable the company to collect humongous user data to train Jio's AI models, of course with consent, a common practice among the likes of Google/Apple who can bundle our photos together based on face recognition techniques etc.,» Shah added.
As part of its 'Connected Vision' Reliance announced the Jio AI-Cloud Welcome Offer during the
