As far as Android is concerned, I do not think there are many nations who have embraced it as well as we have. Be it due to Apple’s initial poor strategy or the HUGE number of low cost smartphones by Indian manufacturers, Android has gained a great victory here, which has no future threat from any other OS.
Besides this, with the growing 3G and the coming 4G, our internet speeds have gained faster speeds on the go. However, the external support in the form of forums has been miniscule at best.
If you have a question pertaining to your device (which is not a Samsung Galaxy or Nexus) the search is a deep one to find something useful.
In fact, sometime back, when I owned Galaxy Ace, I found it difficult to find India specific information regarding that online. However, as the interest of bigger companies has spiked in India with the likes of Google and Apple realizing the importance of a billion strong untapped market, so is the forums increasing.
The biggest of them all – XDA – too has realized that India is a huge source of traffic for them and are changing things around their website. Until now, most of the India related posts were scattered around the website. A person had to toil to find it. All this changes as XDA has curated the content and brought it all in a single place- XDA.in. You can simply go there and find many devices that are India specific and all the information is collected there.
In the words of an XDA admin-
“What many people don’t know is that the second largest source of traffic on XDA after the USA is actually India. And until now, we’ve admittedly done a poor job of supporting these users. We’ve never had a defined process for adding India-only devices, and when we do add them, we’ve often relegated them to our legacy/low activity template.
Often non-supported device discussion gets spread throughout the general forums, which is a problem for forum organization. But more and more, Indian users are becoming valuable members of the community—contributing knowledge, know-how, and excellent development work.”
You can read the whole post here.
For starters the devices that you can find currently on XDA Indian forums are –
- Micromax Canvas 4 A210
- Micromax Canvas Turbo A250
- Micromax Canvas Magnus A117
- Micromax Canvas Doodle A111, Doodle 2 A240
- Micromax Canvas 2 Plus A110Q
- Lenovo K900
- Lenovo A850
- Lenovo A3000
- Lenovo P780
- Samsung Galaxy Grand 2
- Lava Xolo Q1000
- Karbonn A21
As you can see, there are many phones from the likes of Micromax and Lenovo. Karbonn and Lava have found place here as well. This is just the beginning and I expect the growth of this forum to be tremendous. The enthusiasm of Indian contributors will definitely spike as they now have a better platform to share.
What do you people think about it? Have you ever tried XDA forums before? Please tell us what you think of this development.
