Morning wishes by Indians are driving WhatsApp’s user base in the country, but are slowing down smartphones

If you are from India, then waking up to ‘ Good Morning’ messages are just another part of your routine. Since the smartphone boom took place in the country, Indians have developed a habit of forwarding badly edited ‘ Good Morning’ images, memes and even videos via WhatsApp to several contacts and groups. While this can be the most important activity of the day for almost half of the elderly population, it is also pretty annoying for young folks as well as Google. Wonder why? Majority of the Indian smartphone user base consists of affordable low- end Android smartphones with low storage capacities. With hundreds of ‘ Good morning’ and similar greetings in the form of images, GIFs and videos flooding WhatsApp chats across the country, storage spaces on these low- end smartphones are filling up faster than expected. This is leading to the slowing of Android- based smartphones, which is affecting the user experience that Google wants to disseminate on across the board. A report from The Wall Street Journal suggests that Indian prefer to bond with friends and families primarily on WhatsApp instead of any other platform. WhatsApp’s realtime service enables people to share stuff on the platform instead of its parent company’s social media platform Facebook. Most WhatsApp users keep the auto- download images option enabled by default, which keeps flooding the local storage on smartphones. A flooded local storage slows the overall user experience. There are dedicated websites which keep making