Walmart-owned PhonePe, ruling the digital payments sector, introduced the Indus Appstore on February 21 as a Made-in-India offering. By providing over 200,000 mobile apps and games in 45 categories and 12 Indian languages, the Indus Appstore seeks to serve the linguistically diverse Indian market.
To improve user engagement with app discovery, the Indus Appstore will include a discovery option that consists of short videos. Notably, the app store does not charge commissions for using external payment gateways, allowing developers to use any third-party gateway for in-app billing.
This strategy stands in sharp contrast to the current big app shops' fees. In an effort to draw more developers to the platform, Indus Appstore is also waiving listing costs for developers for the first year.
Additionally, PhonePe has disclosed alliances with OEMs like Lava and Nokia that will allow the Indus Appstore to be included into their products. The tactic seeks to lessen the difficulty of manually sideloading programmes onto devices.
An important step towards inclusion is the app store's support for 12 Indian languages in addition to English, which enables users to find and utilise apps in their favourite language.
The company also wants to improve the functionality of the app store and establish additional collaborations with smartphone manufacturers.
