Mukesh Ambani was a busy man, just like his Jio rigs. After receiving a wave of investment, the company is now busy introducing new "Made in India" solutions to solve old digital problems. Just a few days after the launch of JioMeet, their newly approached video conferencing software, the company started anew. This time with JioChat, which rips most of WhatsApp's UI and UX. While JioChat has arguably been around since the telecommunications company took baby steps, the messaging app with over 50 million downloads according to the Play Store) recently underwent a design overhaul. As a result, you hardly notice the difference between JioChat and WhatsApp. By the way, Facebook, which owns WhatApp, is also a major investor in Jio Platforms.
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(Image credit: Google Play Store) A quick side-by-side comparison makes it easy to highlight the similarities between the two chat apps. From the color scheme, product name placement, icons like search and camera to tabs like Chat and Status (renamed Stories in JioChat). The only obvious difference is the presence of channel functionality in JioChat which is missing from WhatsApp and instead of naming the Calls tabs as calls, JioChat uses a cell phone icon. Even the location of the new chat icon at the bottom right is similar, although the icon itself is slightly different.
#Jio starts again. Discover the "new look" of #JioChat. Have you ever seen this user interface? Now don't tell me #Facebook "licensed" Jio to use the #WhatsApp UI after €5.7 billion was invested in the richest human-run business in Asia. https://t.co/1cG1oZTmYI pic.twitter.com/DC5o5oRZEeJuly 5, 2020
What's behind the move?
There are many jokes about how Jio Platforms is fighting ideas and designs from potential competitors, some wonder why the company, which can afford to hire an army of developers from around the world to create innovative and useful designs, uses copy of products. Twitter takes issue with comparisons between JioChat and WhatsApp, with some even suggesting that it's a strategy by Reliance Jio Platforms to ease the transition from a global product to a made-in-India product. Another theory is that the company was using this as a marketing gimmick. Otherwise starting another messaging app wouldn't be a new thing and even you wouldn't mind reading it, right? At least the fact that JioMeet has already been able to collect over a million downloads suggests the same. In any case, the news of inspiration or imitation of the best products is as out of date as a newspaper from last week. Many Chinese companies like Xiaomi, LeEco, and Zoom, to name a few, are heavily "inspired" by their American counterparts. Apple and Samsung often inspire each other. The same is true between Android and iOS. The list of these products is endless, and we can make a separate article about it. However, we expect a lot of innovation from Jio, after all, being Aatmnirbhar is the key, hence the question of why not use the newly acquired funds to create a revolutionary product makes a lot of sense.