News & Analysis

JioMeet: Indigenous solution with an “inspired” implementation

Image Source: Jio

Amid the calls of making India self-reliant, Mukesh Ambani led Jio has announced a homegrown video calling solution – JioMeet to take on the likes of Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet etc.

Ever since the coronavirus-outbreak, remote working has become a critical part of the new normal lifestyle and we saw an increased demand for remote collaborating and video-conferencing solutions. JioMeet caters to this ballooning requirement and offers HD audio and Video calls with enterprise-grade security measures.

In a bid to disrupt the market, Jio has offered the video calling service unlimited and free to everyone for up to 100 participants in the call. The JioMeet focuses on an easy to use interface and allows users to download the application on all platforms including Android, iOS, macOS and Windows. Users can participate in the calls without even creating a user ID.

Among the key features of this homegrown video-calling platform are, unlimited meetings every day without a time cap, secured calls, waiting room, pre-scheduling of calls, multiple logins with up to 5 devices with a single user ID offering seamless switching between different devices and password-protected meetings.

While a local solution like JioMeet is a welcome move, the fact that the entire application looks highly inspired by Zoom both in terms of features and design is slightly disappointing. Experts have called out the bizarre move by Jio to copy the entire product as it is and Twitter is full of people mocking Jio’s efforts or rather lack of. 

Right from the application icon, to the graphical layout, phrases, other designs, content placement and same features make JioMeet look like a blatant rip-off. A multi-billion-dollar brand like Jio is expected to bring innovation and should’ve led by example.

To give a perspective, SensorTower had reported that Zoom was the most downloaded application in the first quarter in India with over 6 million downloads during this time. These downloads were mainly driven by the users who were suddenly forced to work remotely and students look to continue their education online. 

However, Zoom’s continuous struggle with privacy and security related issues saw its implementation for official uses being banned in various countries including India. Thus the demand for a domestic solution gained prominence.

Despite its copy-paste effort, JioMeet is a response to the Government’s call for creating an indigenous video-calling solution and offers a solution to localisation of data and data privacy concerns. At the time of writing this article, there are various other homegrown video-calling solutions raring to go live, however, we can only counter these leading applications by implementing innovative solutions and path-breaking ideas.

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