Pretty much nailed it. How many big companies are out there, which are not taking advantage of their partial monopoly or huge influence?
Money always wins. Capitalism encourages for endless growth and profits.
I still use my 10-year old Samsung Galaxy 2 phone (mainly as mp3 player and spare phone when I want to take a more expendable one).
Flash it with cyanogen and you have a basic smartphone that still feels snappy.
https://cyanogenmodroms.com/i9100/
My main phone is a 5 year old Galaxy S7 and I would very likely buy another as my main phone if this one was lost.
The 300m people Jio is hoping to migrate from 2G to 4G with this phone will now be able to use essential apps such as those needed for Covid vaccination registration, job searches and digital payments. Hence this is hugely empowering.
I find your comment a little disheartening, sorry. You could buy on a black friday sale, or eBay - but so what? The target segment for this phone makes less than $300 a month.
I find your lack of effort "a little disheartening" as you say. It's like you don't want to believe it's cheap and easy to get a decent new phone for very little.
I went to the trouble of doing what you were too lazy to do. I don't have time to do more pointless googling but Verizon prepaid sells a no contract $55 smartphone today. You can likely get better deals if you shop around at all, or are in a cheaper market than the USA. I'm not going to engage with you further, do your own work. https://www.verizon.com/smartphones/orbic-maui-prepaid/?cmp=...
The cheapest phone in India with an HD display comes in at around 25% higher than what Jio phone will sell for (if the $50 turns out to be true).
Disclosure: I did work with Jio (as a consultant) on software for their older JioPhone, running a version of Firefox OS. It sold about 70 million units.
This is classic PR, inventing a fake reason why a profitmaking move is somehow altruistic.
It works on many such as you because many such as you are steeped in the middle class world of $300 flagship phones every couple years and were unaware that decent sub $50 phones have been around for years.
Even a pretty nice phone like a Google pixel or Google pixel 2 can be had for about $100 used. They work great still and only have issues because of intentional choices by Google to prevent security updates. It's only a policy thing, no technical cause -- custom ROMs allow latest Android to be used just fine.
I can't express my contempt for big companies creating an artificial problem, then trying to get credit for partially fixing it.
PS: I relied on the $40 moto G for a few years without issues except "kind of slow". I upgraded to a used Google pixel off eBay for $100 a few years ago. I'm a software engineer and use plenty of popular apps. The forced upgrade treadmill is totally artificial. Just look at the specs on the Google pixel 2 vs pixel 5 sometime. No practical difference, just a bunch of marginal gimmicky stuff like 4 cameras, fingerprint readers that are on the screen instead of the back, etc.