The Jio Phone - first announced in July, and in the market from September - is an interesting device that tries to bridge the gap between smart phones and feature phones. We noted in our review that for a very specific niche, the phone has the potential to be a major game changer. However, there's one thing that's missing from the phone - the messaging-giant WhatsApp. The app is incredibly popular in India, and so it's perhaps no surprise that a lot of people were looking for workarounds to get it up and running on the smart-feature phone.
So it was not a surprise when videos showing people how to use get WhatsApp on a Jio Phone using a Web-based tool called Browser ling soon went viral. Essentially, you could visit the Browser ling website on the Jio Phone, and make WhatsApp think that you were visiting from a PC. This would allow you to run WhatsApp Web on the device.
This sudden interest from India came as a bit of a surprise to Peter Kremlins, CEO of the Oakland, California-based developer-focused startup Browser ling, as tens of thousands of new users started coming in with no warning.
"I started Browser ling in 2010 as a tool for developers. The idea of Browser ling is to provide an easy cross-browser testing service to Web developers," Krumins explains. "It's very difficult to test websites as there are so many different browsers running on different operating systems. To make great websites you've to test your HTML code and JavaScript code in various Internet Explorer versions, and you've to test it in Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, and then in mobile browsers, too. This requires the Web developer to maintain a bunch of virtual machines and various browser installs, which takes a lot of time. At Browser ling we run all these operating systems and all the browsers and web developers can get a browser for testing in five seconds."
