The Internet Is Filling Up Because Indians Are Sending Tons of ‘Good Morning!’ Texts Over social platforms

Surveys conducted and shocking results came. The country, newly online, has become obsessed with sending greetings from their smartphones, causing head scratching in Silicon Valley.

Google researchers in Silicon Valley were searching to figure out why so many smartphones were freezing up half a world away. One in three smartphone users in India run out of space on their phones daily.

The answer? Two words. “Good Morning!”

The glitch, Google discovered, was an overabundance of flowers, adorable toddlers, birds and sunsets, new year wishes, daily greetings etc. sent along with a cheery message.


Millions of Indians are getting online for the first time—and they are filling up the internet. Many like nothing better than to begin the day by sending greetings from their phones. Starting before sunrise and reaching a crescendo before 8 a.m., internet newbies post millions of good-morning images to friends, family and strangers.

All that good cheer is driving a 10-fold increase in the number of Google searches for “Good Morning images” over the past five years. Pinterest, the San Francisco visual-search platform, added a new section to display images with quotes. It saw a ninefold increase over the past year in the number of people in India downloading such pictures.

Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp messaging service—which has 200 million monthly active users in India, making the country its biggest market—added a status message last year so users could say good morning to all of their contacts at once.

In one recent dispatch, a toddler sporting a fedora and holding his hand over his chest says, “Our heart is the only thing in the world that works without any rest. So keep it happy, whether it is yours or your dear one’s. Good Morning.”

In another, an image of Krishna, the Hindu god of love, is paired with the words “Good Morning. Silent prayers often reach God faster, because they are not bound by the weight of words."

Perhaps India’s most famous morning-message enthusiast is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He gets up at 5 a.m. to practice yoga and is known to fire off good-morning messages as the sun is rising. Last year, he admonished a group of lawmakers for not responding to his greetings.


In India, inexpensive smartphones and data plans have brought an unlikely group of users online: the uneducated and illiterate, who are adapting apps to fit their own needs and skills. The Wall Street Journal Bonding with large groups through work, school, family and friend circles is important for Indians. This is one reason wedding celebrations often involve hundreds if not thousands of guests. That tendency has been given new fuel in the form of affordable smartphones and wireless broadband.

Some complain all these greetings come too early, are too cheery and too likely to freeze their low-cost, low-memory phones. To deal with the annoying morning cheer, some leave message groups or refuse to download the images.

Popular Indian comedy group “All India Bakchod” addressed the issue in an October skit. A bedraggled man plays the role of WhatsApp, driven to exhaustion by a demanding mother who orders him to deliver morning messages to friends and family who ignore the messenger.


When Google researchers peeked into Indian consumers’ phones, they found thousands of “good morning” images gumming up their storage. One in three smartphone users in India run out of space daily, according to a survey by data-storage firm Western Digital Corp. , compared with one in 10 in the U.S.

Google’s solution: a new app called Files Go that highlights files for possible deletion—with a special feature to search out and delete all good-morning messages at once.

The company used its giant image database and artificial-intelligence tools to train the app to weed out good-morning messages. The key to spotting them was looking for a certain size and type of image file, said Josh Woodward, the Google product manager in Mountain View, Calif., who led the effort.

Google unveiled the app in December in New Delhi. The morning-message deleting function prompted the crowd of media and government officials to break out in applause.

The app has more than 10 million downloads so far, with more users in India than any other country. It has cleared up on average more than 1 gigabyte of data per user, Google said.

One recent message shows a golden sunset and the phrase, “We permit limitations to limit us, instead of limiting our limitations.” Another, showing a single red rose, says, “Good morning to my life’s rose. Your fragrance makes all of life’s thorns worth tolerating.”

WhatsApp says more than 20 billion New Year’s messages were sent in India, a record, and more than any other country.