WhatsApp's Good Morning' wishes are killing Android phones

If you are from India, then waking up to ‘Good Morning’ messages are just another part of your routine. Since the smartphone boom took place in the country, Indians have developed a habit of forwarding badly edited ‘Good Morning’ images, memes and even videos via WhatsApp to several contacts and groups. While this can be the most important activity of the day for almost half of the elderly population, it is also pretty annoying for young folks as well as Google. Wonder why?

Majority of the Indian smartphone user base consists of affordable low-end Android smartphones with low storage capacities. With hundreds of ‘Good morning’ and similar greetings in the form of images, GIFs and videos flooding WhatsApp chats across the country, storage spaces on these low-end smartphones are filling up faster than expected. This is leading to the slowing of Android-based smartphones, which is affecting the user experience that Google wants to disseminate on across the board.

A report from The Wall Street Journal suggests that Indian prefer to bond with friends and families primarily on WhatsApp instead of any other platform. WhatsApp’s real-time service enables people to share stuff on the platform instead of its parent company’s social media platform Facebook. Most WhatsApp users keep the auto-download images option enabled by default, which keeps flooding the local storage on smartphones. A flooded local storage slows the overall user experience. There are dedicated websites which keep making these kinds of images, GIFs and videos, most of which get forwarded on WhatsApp and end up reaching those who even don’t like such stuff.

Google has been up burning the midnight oil and deduced that India’s elderly smartphone user base prefers to send ‘e-junk’ on WhatsApp for spreading positivity and expressing their good wishes. Therefore, for the country’s elderly that’s obsessed with WhatsApp, Google is taking the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and its clever image recognition technologies to speed up India’s low-end midrange smartphones. Their recent Google File Go app, which was meant to be a smart file managing solution for entry-level Android smartphone users, is using Google’s prowess in AI to fish out these annoying photos and videos from smartphones. Google’s smart algorithm looks for certain key properties of these images such as file sizes and file extension, along with certain visual deconstruction abilities to read the junk files and provide the users with an option to delete them. The app is available for free to download on the Google PlayStore.

If you are extremely short on storage space, then it would be wise to turn off ‘auto download images and videos’ on mobile data and Wi-Fi, thus letting you decide what to download and what not to. Also, it is advisable to keep clearing cache memory and remove unused apps to extract more space on your Android device.

(source)