Hike launches its own operating system, Total: Which works without internet

Hike Messenger has become really popular in India over the years. The company is expanding its business by not only giving a great messaging application to its customers but now the company has an operating system based on Android. The Total is an operating system by Hike which is based on Android. The speciality of this operating system is that it provides various services without using the mobile data.

Total by Hike has partnered up with telecom giant Airtel to enable USSD based services which will bring down the cost of data to as low as Re. 1. The company has also partnered up with Intex and Karbonn who will produce handsets running on the Total operating system out of the box.

On the launch of ‘Total, built by hike’, Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike said, “For the next billion true mobile-first users, coming online can still be quite complicated and intimidating. Simplify, simplify, simplify. That’s all we’ve been doing. We’ve taken the 15-20 step process of someone coming online and made it into only a few steps - “Buy a phone, turn it on and you’re good to go. Everything, all the essential services all work out of the box even without data.”

Kavin further added, “Our goal is to bring India online and online means data so we’ve also made it extremely simple to buy data packs right contextually inside the OS itself. We’ve worked closely with telcos on special data packs for these phones starting as low as Re 1/- to give people a taste of what it feels like. This is really powerful.”

Total brings a bunch of basic applications preinstalled which can work with just a minimum use of data.  The popular messaging application Hike Messenger will also work on all phones running on Total OS without consuming any data.

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These services are being used over a new technology called universal transfer protocol (UTP) which is a better version of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD). Hike is the first company to introduce this technology around the world.

However, in cases where the user really needs to use data, he can quickly purchase packets for as low as Re. 1 which will give him 20MB of data.