Reliance Jio's cloud storage offer could undercut Google One and iCloud pricing

Reliance Jio's 100GB free cloud storage offer could challenge Google One and iCloud's dominance among Android and Apple phone users in India, something which Dropbox and Microsoft's OneDrive haven't been able to do as yet, experts said.

The competition could also nudge these players to lower their pricing - Google One (100GB at ₹130), iCloud (50GB at ₹75) - a trend emerging as Indian players like Ola, and MapMyIndia, challenge the large Western counterparts like Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft's Azure, Google etc.

"Jio has brought a very lucrative proposition for an average phone user in India who struggles to upgrade memory because of paid storage," said Neil Shah, founding partner of technology consulting firm Counterpoint Research. "But, bundling of products and services with the OS ecosystem is a key challenge here."

For instance, WhatsApp or the majority of app data is currently backed up in iCloud and Google One. "There has to be some push for the policy side as well to make the tech ecosystem a level-playing field. The Competition Commission of India is looking into these matters," Shah said.

Jio's strategy goes beyond data storage.

"Adoption of the Jio Cloud will enable the company to collect humongous user data to train Jio's AI models, of course with consent, a common practice among the likes of Google/Apple who can bundle our photos together based on face recognition techniques etc.," Shah added.

As part of its 'Connected Vision' Reliance announced the Jio AI-Cloud Welcome Offer during the company's 47th Annual General Meeting on Thursday. This Diwali, Jio users will get up to 100 GB of free cloud storage to store and access all their photos, videos, documents, all other digital content, and data at affordable prices, it said.

Indian tech companies have upped the ante against their foreign rivals.

Back in June, ride aggregator Ola Cabs announced its exit from Azure Cloud to its homegrown Krutrim Cloud. Later in July, It also rolled out Ola Maps, a digital mapping solution which it said was created using proprietary and open data.

Exiting Google Maps saved ₹100 crore in annual spending by the company, Bhavish Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Ola said in a blog on X at the time.

Subsequently, global mapping leader Google cut prices of Google Maps for developers in India by 70%, the biggest drop ever. For Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) developers, the discount was 90%.

Again, in response to Google, Ola Maps also announced a 50% discount to Google's reduced prices for large volumes. It also offered 5 million free API calls per month.