Micromax states that it has a strong understanding of what Indian consumers are after in terms of software and believes that it can use this to differentiate itself from its competitors.

Micromax’s CTO, Ashish Agrawal, explains that the Indian population has different use cases for their devices than the people of the US or China.

The upcoming OS from Micromax will be similar to other ROMs that are now available in the market, as it will also be a forked Android version taking advantage of Google’s open source platform. Micromax will create some application that runs on its operating system. According to Agrawal, the new OS is expected to rollout by the end of this financial year. He further added that the company isn’t breaking away from Android, but looking forward to develop a customized OS and apps for its target audience in India.

Just like most other companies, Micromax has also realised that it has to start shifting the focuss on software.

As of now, the Micromax sits comfortably in the 2nd position which closed its fiscal 2015 with Rs 11,000 crore of revenue on the smartphones segment and 3rd in the tablet arena with 9% share for the quarter ended March 2015.

In an interview with ET, Micromax co-founder Vikas Jain said, “We’re excellent with partnerships and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel”. The company has also begun investing in startups that build services which can be integrated into devices – for instance health start up Healthifyme, online travel portal ixigo and US-based consumer cloud provider MiMedia.

Off late a large number of companies have been coming out with their own version of Android skinned over the android devices.

These apps and services will eventually be making their way into the YU series of smartphones.

The research and development team of the company based in Bengaluru will be doing this flagship project and more than 75 employees have been deployed from the Nokia research and development in Beijing.