India May Soon Launch Its Own ‘Atmanirbhar’ App Store: Report
Oct. 2, 2020Interestingly, theET Nowreport suggests that this rumoredIndia’s app store will not levy a 30 percent cutto host apps. While it obviously sounds good on paper, we will have to wait to see how efficient this approach would be or if there are any catch to this claim.
“Android has 97% market share in India so we should intervene and handhold Indian startups. Making it mandatory for Android phones to be pre-installed with our apps in under consideration,”sources familiar with the matter toldET Now.
According to the report, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will be responsible for developing this potentialGoogle Play Store alternative.
In case you didn’t know already, there already exists a government app store called ‘Mobile Seva’. The report goes on to say that thegovernment may scale up this existing Mobile Seva Storefor this new initiative.
Building an app store might not be a mountainous task, but attracting developers to make their apps available in the app store will be. Even tech giants such as Samsung and Huawei have taken years to make most of the popular apps available on their app stores despite oftenincentivizing developerswith various schemes.
If this new rumor becomes a reality, it will be interesting to see if this India-first app store gains enough traction to emerge as a mainstream platform for downloading apps in the country.
Subin writes about consumer tech, software, and security. He secretly misses the headphone jack while pretending he’s better off with the wireless freedom.
