Mobile manufacturers and the Indian Cellular Association - an industry group representing mobile manufacturers - have been urged to pre-load NPCI's BHIM application, in a meeting with the secretaries of MEITY and Department of Telecom, as per a tweet from Ajay Kumar, Additional Secretary of MEITY. The meeting, according to the tweet, took place on 11th of September. Mobile Mfg cos. & @icaind2003 urged to preload @NPCI_BHIM in smartphones in a meeting @SecretaryMEITY & Secretary @DoT_India on 11/9/17. — Ajay Kumar (@drajaykumar_ias) September 12, 2017 A few points on this development: 1. Preloading is a standard, age-old, industry practice, based on mutual agreements between handset manufacturers and app developers. Nokia used to do pre-loading deals in pre-iPhone, pre-Android days. Many of the Indian OEMs, when they first launched with barely functional phones (so low on memory that they'd keep crashing) did a lot of preloading deals too. "Urge" is probably a polite way of putting it, but really, it's doubtful that the handset manufacturers will now not-preload the BHIM app. 2. Addresses some of the usage problems but not all: The decision to use an app involves multiple stages of thinking: awareness, discovery, acquisition (download), signing-up and usage. Preloading addresses the discovery and acquisition part of this problem, but doesn't address awareness, signing-up and usage. Most importantly, it doesn't guarantee usage. 3. Government backed competitive advantage for BHIM will hurt UPI: forced (or is it "urged"?) preloading means that apps that compete with BHIM, including PhonePe and Chillr, and all the UPI apps from…
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