Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
Image Source : The Express Tribune

India has plans to launch their own mobile app store or expand the existing one if they receive huge demand from domestic firms for an alternative to Apple and Google. India has around 500 million smartphone users and most of them use the Android platform of Google and Indian start-ups have also criticized the company for the policies which according to them stifle their growth.

Paytm, which is one of the leading payment firm of India has protested against the decision of the U.S. tech giant removing the app for a few hours last month due to violations of gambling policies.

Image Source : The Express Tribune

Last week, Google said that they would enforce a policy that will levy 30% commission on payments made through the apps on their Android store. A senior Indian official said that Reuters has not received any sort of request but were considering to develop a mobile platform where apps can be downloaded. He also said that before they open one, they have to know that there will be takers for it.

India is at present running a mobile app store which lists around 1200 government-backed applications including Paytm and government should consider to expand that instead of starting from the scratch. The technology ministry of India, Google and Apple have not yet commented anything on this regard.

Image Source : Dhaka Tribune

Google stated that less than 3% developers with apps on Play Store sold digital goods in the last 12 months and 97% also comply with the payment system policy. many Indian start-up founders have also demanded a local app store that doesn’t charge a high amount of service fee.

Vishal Gondal, who is the co-founder of Bengaluru-based gaming firm nCore Games said that it is important to have a local app store and if they have to give 30% fees to Google and pay for customer acquisition, then their business won’t survive.

Paytm didn’t agree to the assessment by Google but removed particular promotions to get the app reinstated. Their founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said that Google was acting like a judge, jury and executioner. Google, without referring Paytm said that their policies were aimed to protect users from any sort of harm and were applied and enforced to all developers.

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