JioPhone Next to Help Jio Break Market Shackles, Cannot Be Compared to LYF Phones

JioPhone Next

Everyone’s waiting to see how the JioPhone Next will perform in the Indian market. I have already talked about what JioPhone Next needs to do for garnering success in the Indian market. But, there is a set of users/people who are quite sceptical about Reliance Jio’s plans for launching the new affordable 4G smartphone. These users are comparing the JioPhone Next with the LYF phones.

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For the unaware, Jio was selling the affordable LYF smartphones and marketing them heavily back in 2016. Even though these devices came with 4G support and were affordable, the user experience was quite bad. Eventually, brands such as Xiaomi and Redmi started offering alternatives and LYF is now almost gone from the Indian market.

Many users are comparing the LYF smartphones with the JioPhone Next because the latter is supposed to be a cheap 4G smartphone, just like the former. So what’s the point of launching the JioPhone Next? If LYF phones couldn’t make an impact and convert legacy network users to 4G networks, why will JioPhone Next be able to do that?

The answer to this question is, JioPhone Next and LYF phones both serve a different purpose to the company and the market, and the JioPhone Next is a completely different offering. Let me explain why.

LYF Smartphones Purpose in 2016

LYF Phones

Before we understand what Reliance Jio intends to do with the JioPhone Next, let’s understand the purpose of LYF smartphones. Jio announced its arrival in the Indian market in late 2016. When Jio arrived, there were few operators, including Airtel, Vodafone, and others already providing 4G services in select parts of India.

All of these operators were pre-dominantly offering 4G LTE services, while Jio wanted to offer 4G VoLTE services. However, there weren’t many affordable smartphones available at the time that supported 4G VoLTE. In the 2016 and 2017 period, only select devices supported 4G VoLTE, and the rest ran with 4G LTE support.