Here's how you can use WhatsApp on your JioPhone

Mukesh Ambani's latest gamble – the JioPhone – created quite a buzz at the time of its announcement, and it came as no surprise that the "essentially free" phone caught the imagination of the country and ended up snapping up lakhs of registrations during its pre-order phase.

For the price it's being sold at, there's no denying the JioPhone is a groundbreaking device. It has to its advantage some interesting features too, but what it does lack are some widely used applications that have become central to the smartphone dependent modern way of life.

Need for WhatsApp

With more than 200 million active daily users in India and more than a billion worldwide, WhatsApp is by no means just another messaging app. Thus, the frailties of this device boasting of smartphone-like features got brutally exposed when it emerged that the JioPhone's KaiOS-based platform could not play host to the world's biggest messaging service.

The lack of support for WhatsApp not only makes it a less exciting proposition but also opens up a window of opportunity for its competitors which looks likely to be exposed by ultra-affordable smartphones such as the Airtel-Karbonn A40 Indian that run all popular Android-based apps on it. 

But as luck would have it, before the operating system's bottleneck could snowball into a major problem for the telecom operator, the fabled ingenuity of Indians looks to have solved this one for the JioPhone, which has been successfully shown to run WhatsApp on it using a workaround. 

How to run WhatsApp on JioPhone

According to a video posted on a YouTube channel, Indian Jugaad Tech, the quickest and easiest way of running the popular messaging platform is by using a service called Browserling, designed by Silicon Valley-based software developer Peter Krumins. 

The service launched as a cross-browser testing tool for web developers has enabled users to access not just WhatsApp but also services like Facebook and Instagram. For this, users first need to open Browserling in their JioPhone's web browsers. Once there, select their browser of choice – Opera, Chrome and Firefox.

After locking down on the browser of your choice, the next step is to head to WhatsApp web – http://web.whatsapp.com. From there users can follow the instructions and run WhatsApp on the webpage.

Paid service

With the service becoming extremely popular with users in India, Browserling, which started as a free service up until some time ago has been put behind a paywall by its creator Peter Krumins. Upon being faced with managing "crazy traffic" of thousands of visitors trying to use Browserling as a WhatsApp proxy tool, the service now charges its users a minimal amount – Rs 9 for a daily plan up to Rs 99 for a yearly one – for using it to access popular services like WhatsApp and Facebook on their feature phones. 

Krumins recently said in an interview, "We are currently running a multivariate test on various plans and prices to find which ones are the most popular. I randomly display an option to buy a daily plan, a weekly plan, or a monthly plan with a different price... I'm using the local Indian payment processor called Instamojo, which is Stripe for India and integrates together all possible Indian payment methods."

But that's not all. Browserling has plans to take things up a notch. In another interview with GadgetsNow, Krumins also revealed that he also has plans to announce an application for Browserling, which will make the process of using the service as a proxy to access WhatsApp much more easier. 

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