Global competition: PhonePe’s Indus Appstore is Made in India to compete at a global level, according to G20 Sherpa and former Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant.

The Indus Appstore was launched in Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on Thursday as a homegrown alternative for Android apps, becoming a direct challenger to Google Play Store.

Terming it a disruption, Kant said such innovations have been pioneered through American BigTech firms like Google, Apple and Amazon. In China,  Tencent and Alibaba have been the forerunners in launching product innovations for developers.

“(The Indus Appstore) will stimulate huge innovation in India…will give developers right tools and visibility, and localisation will help empower rural India,” Kant said.

He added that the launch was timely for Android developers, and has the potential to bridge the expectation gap between developers and app store providers on the appropriate platform.

“I am confident that PhonePe will take an India first approach to enabling innovation at scale,” he said, which is in line with the "Make in India" initiative. 

India is the second-largest smartphone market in the world, and the launch of Indus Appstore by Walmart-backed PhonePe leverages this opportunity.

The Indus Appstore, launched in 12 languages, has a short video-led discovery mechanism for applications. It will also not charge developers for a year to list their apps, relying on an advertisement model for revenue. With access to over 2 lakh mobile apps and games across 45 categories, the Appstore also levies no extra charge on payments made by third-party apps.
 

Kant also emphasised the potential of Indus Appstore to democratise tech innovation across rural areas and smaller towns. “With 1,400 dialects and 22 languages, this will cause a huge disruption and create a great India story,” he said.