IOI
India already makes almost every phone it uses. According to the Ministry of Electronics and IT, 99.2% of the mobile phones in Indian pockets today are made in India, and smartphones became the country’s single largest export in 2025, ahead of diesel and cut diamonds. Yet when you flip most of those phones over, the logo belongs to someone else. On 23 October, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw put a date on changing that: a truly Indian-designed smartphone, sold under an Indian brand.
“This is 23 October 2026. Please note it: 23 October 2028. You will have Indian-designed, Indian-manufactured, Indian-branded mobile phones.”
Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics and IT, at the NDTV World Summit 2026
He called it India’s own Apple and Samsung moment. It is a bold promise, and a useful one, because a hard date can be checked. The real question is what it will take to get from assembling the world’s phones to designing and owning one.
What exactly was promised
Responding to NDTV’s Rahul Kanwal, who asked why India still has no homegrown rival to Apple or Samsung, the minister said the capability is being built in layers. Three years ago, the government challenged Indian designers to design a phone’s printed circuit board, the motherboard that every other component plugs into. Two companies took it on. According to Vaishnaw, one of them produced a design that a major US telecom provider selected, and the company has since designed and delivered a 5G phone that is being supplied to that operator’s customers.
“Now we will use that capability to have the Indian brand, Indian design, Indian IP,” he said, as reported by NDTV. What he did not share is just as important: no company was named, and neither was the US operator, the brand, a price, or a specification. As Mint noted, there is also no indication yet of how much of the phone’s bill of materials will come from Indian suppliers.
From assembly line to design studio
The manufacturing base is no longer the problem. Figures the ministry shared with Parliament in July show mobile phone production rising from about ₹18,000 crore in 2014-15 to about ₹6.27 lakh crore in 2025-26, a 33-fold jump, while phone exports grew 165 times to about ₹2.59 lakh crore. India is now the world’s second-largest phone maker by volume, and the mobile ecosystem employs around 12 lakh people.
Policy is now shifting from volume to value. In July, the Union Cabinet approved the Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme, a ₹62,500 crore programme running from 2026-27 to 2030-31. Alongside production incentives of 2.25% to 5%, it offers up to 1.5% more for sourcing key components locally, and an extra 3% on eligible sales for Indian brands that invest in design and R&D. The stated aim is “technological sovereignty” and Indian patents in phone design. In other words, the 2028 deadline sits on top of real money.
Why designing a phone is the hard part
Vaishnaw himself walked through the difficulty. A phone has to fit radio-frequency communication, antennas, compute, memory, passive components, cameras, a display and power management into a pocket-sized body, while keeping weight and battery drain in check. Assembly is a process problem. Integration is an engineering and intellectual-property problem, and that is where global brands have spent decades and billions.
There are three gaps to watch:
- Silicon. Processors and memory make up nearly 40% of a smartphone’s cost and are still imported, according to The Financial Express. An Indian-designed phone in 2028 will very likely still run on foreign chips.
- Brand trust. Lava, the most resilient homegrown brand, held about 1% of India’s smartphone market in 2025 according to Counterpoint data, down from 6–8% a decade ago. Consumers have to believe an Indian flagship can match a global one.
- Scale. Global brands spread R&D, marketing and component deals across hundreds of millions of units. An Indian brand will need export markets, not just home turf, to compete on price.
Why it matters beyond phones
The value in a smartphone sits in design, software, chips and brand, not in the final screw. A country that only assembles keeps a thin slice of each device. A country that owns the design keeps the patents, the engineering jobs and the pricing power, and builds skills that carry over into laptops, wearables, telecom gear and defence electronics.
That is why the motherboard story matters more than the headline. If an Indian team really has designed a 5G board good enough for a large US carrier, the hardest muscle is already being built. The next two years are about turning one design win into a product line, a brand people want and a supply chain that keeps more of the value at home.
The IOI take
Two years is short for building a global phone brand from scratch, and it is fair to be sceptical. But India has surprised the world on deadlines before, from UPI to 5G rollout, and this one comes with a funded scheme and a working design behind it. The test on 23 October 2028 will not be whether a phone carries an Indian logo. It will be whether Indians choose it over the alternatives.
So, would you switch to an Indian-designed flagship if it matched the iPhone or Galaxy on quality? Tell us on X at @IOIbreaking.
Sources: NDTV, Mint, The Economic Times, Press Information Bureau (Ministry of Electronics and IT), Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 510 (22 July 2026), The Financial Express.
