Author’s note: On October 23 2023, three days after this article was published, Megam Solutions Pvt Ltd issued a public announcement in the print edition of The Hindu, saying an engineer working on an open source repository made an unintentional mistake and mentioned the name ‘BharOS’. This change in the open source code has no connection whatsoever with BharOS used by JandK Operations Pvt Ltd, it said. Despite this development, questions raised within this article about the security claims and the indigenous nature of the BharOS project still stand.
In a development that has sparked outrage among India's free and open source software communities, it has come to light that India's much-hyped ‘indigenously developed’ mobile operating system, BharOS, could in fact be a simple clone of GrapheneOS – a popular privacy and security focused mobile operating system – with a few cosmetic changes.
