Reliance Has Officially Launched Its Zoom Competitor Called JioMeet

OfficeChai Team

When Reliance had announced last month that it was going to launch a video conferencing app, it was believed that it would be an Indian alternative to Zoom. When Reliance has officially launched JioMeet, people are marveling at how much of a Zoom competitor it really is.

Jio today formally launched JioMeet, its video conferencing app. Like Zoom, JioMeet offers unlimited number of free calls in high definition (720p) to users and supports as many as 100 participants on a call. Jio also has no restrictions on the length of the calls, with Jio saying that calls can be uninterrupted  for “up to 24 hours.” Unlike Zoom though, JioMeet is currently free, and there is no clarity if JioMeet will ever have paid plans.

But what seems to have caught the attention of users is the similarity of JioMeet’s UI and UX to Zoom’s. Several Twitter users have compared the user interfaces of the two apps, and it’s undeniable that JioMeet seems to be heavily inspired by Zoom.

Some memes have begun doing the rounds too. 

 

Even though the user interfaces of the two apps are uncannily similar, this won’t be the first time when a tech company has copied features of successful competitors — Instagram, WhatsApp and even YouTube have completely copied the stories feature from Snapchat with great success. Closer home, Chinese company Bytedance had copied ShareChat pixel-by-pixel and released Helo, which aided by Bytedance’s financial might, quickly became a big social network.

JioMeet will be hoping to do much of the same. And having a UI that’s a complete copy of Zoom might work to its advantage — people in India have already been using Zoom for the last few months, and are used to the app and its features. But there are concerns around Zoom’s security and privacy — Zoom has been accused of routing data through China, Zoom’s Chinese founder has also raised alarm bells in some circles. If JioMeet has the same features as Zoom, works as well as Zoom, is Indian, and most importantly, is free, it shouldn’t be too hard a sell for it to quickly get lots of new users. And the social media chatter about JioMeet being an exact replica of Zoom might just be the initial marketing push that JioMeet needs.