Puzzled by why one in three smartphone users in India was running out of space on their phones every day, researchers from Google found that it was because of a flood of “Good Morning” messages, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
In the past five years, Google searches for “Good Morning images” rose tenfold. There was a nine-fold such increase on visual-search platform Pinterest. Messaging service WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, added a status message last year that allows users to wish their contacts good morning all at once.
At a weekly meeting with Bharatiya Janata Party lawmakers in December 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had reportedly expressed displeasure at his colleagues’ reluctance to reply to his good morning messages on the Narendra Modi app, NDTV had reported. “I send good morning messages, but apart from five or six MPs, no one responds,” Modi is believed to have said.
To help users running out of space on their phones, the company launched a new app called Files Go that helps users delete unnecessary content. The researchers used Google’s huge image database and artificial intelligence tools to programme the app to find the good morning messages and prompt users to delete them.
“We were trying to deconstruct what is the DNA of a good morning message for months,” said Josh Woodward, the Google product manager who led the effort. “It has been a lot of hard work to get it right.”
The app has been downloaded more than 10 million times, most of it in India, and has deleted on average more than 1GB of data per user, Google said.
Google unveiled the app in New Delhi in December, with the crowd of media and government officials applauding the company for including the morning message delete feature.
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