Good morning images plague many smartphone users in India
Google researchers have discovered why a third of smartphones in India have full storage space every day. A major cause appears to be sending pictures on WhatsApp to wish each other good morning.
More and more Indians are accessing the internet via a smartphone and many of these new users are taking the opportunity to wish family and friends a good morning with a beautiful image. According to an article by The Wall Street Journal, that was noticed by Google. The popularity of the search term ‘Good Morning images’ has increased tenfold in the past five years.
Google Trends shows that this search term is indeed especially popular in India and has increased enormously since 2012. According to the WSJ, Pinterest has created a section with good morning images and has seen traffic there ninefold over the past year.
Even Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is said to be an avid user of the good morning pictures. According to the WSJ, he is known for sending the pictures as soon as the sun comes up and is said to have admonished a group of lawmakers last year after they did not respond to his creative greeting.
Not everyone in India is happy with the good morning pictures. They make the cheap smartphones that are often in use easily jam or falter, because the storage of these devices is always full due to the many pictures that people are sent. It seems that young people in particular are getting tired of their uncles, aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers who keep spamming the pictures. Ignoring the messages can lead to comments from family.
That smartphones in India are often full, was already shown in 2016 by research by Western Digital. The storage memory of one in three devices is full every day, claims the manufacturer. In the US, that would be the case with one in ten smartphones.
One solution from Google to the problem is Files Go, a storage cleaner that the company recently released. This app encourages users to throw their images received via WhatsApp in the trash and can, for example, delete duplicate images.
To tackle the good morning picture problem in India, Google trained the app’s artificial intelligence to recognize such pictures. Google tells WSJ that it spent months “deconstructing the DNA of a good morning message.” In December, Google presented the app in India. The functionality for deleting good morning pictures would have been received with applause there.
As smartphones keep getting cheaper, more and more people in India are getting access to the internet in recent years. That increase will probably continue in the near future, because it is expected that the first Android Go devices will appear in India at the end of this month, with a price from 26 euros.
Good morning images via Google Image Search