Walmart-owned PhonePe on Wednesday launched Indus Appstore, a homegrown Android app store that will compete with Google Play Store, to Indian consumers in India.
The launch comes about four months after the digital payments firm opened up its app marketplace to Android developers, inviting them to publish their app on the platform.
Indus Appstore will be available in English and 12 Indian languages, which allows users to explore the app store in their preferred language.
With Indus Appstore, PhonePe aims to create more competitive and localised mobile app store economy for India, which is already the largest mobile apps download market globally.
Indians spent about 1.19 trillion hours on mobile apps in 2023, up from 954 billion hours in 2021, as per app intelligence firm data.ai. The country is also the world’s largest market in terms of app downloads.
“Indus Appstore allows Indian consumers to download over 2 lakh mobile apps and games, across 45 categories. Users will be able to discover these apps conveniently in 12 Indian languages, thereby catering to 95% of Indians’ language preferences. The app store also offers a brand new short-video based discovery feature, to make new app discovery more engaging for consumers, PhonePe said in a statement.
In a global first move, Indus Appstore allows app and game developers to choose any 3rd-party payment gateway for in-app billing, and they will not be charged any commission if they use an external payment gateway. At a later date, Indus will also provide its own in-app billing and catalog solutions, but these will remain strictly optional for app developers. Further, to accelerate developer registrations, Indus is offering zero listing fees to developers for one year, it said.
Sameer Nigam, CEO and founder of PhonePe, said, “Indus Appstore challenges the status quo, ushering in an era of more healthy competition in the mobile app marketplace, which in turn should help create a more democratic and vibrant Indian digital ecosystem. Indus Appstore embodies our commitment to building a truly inclusive digital ecosystem where every Indian user feels at home.”
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