Bengaluru, Karnataka, India-headquartered Indian digital payments and financial services company PhonePe has revealed plans to build a localized app store for the Indian market as it seeks to challenge Google’s dominance.
According to an internal company document, the app store will be designed to offer hyper-localized services based on customer context and aims to assist developers with high-quality user acquisition through multilingual solutions. The app store will also offer a premium experience for millions of users with high-quality ads and custom targeting support for 12 languages and 24/7 live chat.
Talking about the startup’s plan to roll out an App Store, the company said,
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“Google controls 97% of the Indian app store market and there is an opportunity for a company like PhonePe, which has amassed over 450 million registered users in the country, to build an alternative app store that is more localized not only from a language perspective but also from a discovery and consumer interest perspective.
“All OEMs are excited about PhonePe building out a localized App Store for the Indian market. We expect to be live on Android OEMs within the first few months after launch. We have already closed terms with one of the major OEMs and are trying to get the others on board quickly in the next couple of months.
The app store is the latest product push from PhonePe, which recently also entered the e-commerce category. The startup’s proposed plan to build an app store comes after the Indian antitrust watchdog Competition Commission of India (CCI) last October ordered Google to make a series of changes, such as renouncing agreements that ensure exclusivity for its search services and mandatory. pre-installation of the apps.
The decision was cheered by startups in India after the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an antitrust order forcing Google to change how it operates its popular Android platform, which they say will open up the market to rivals and increase competition.
In March 2023, PhonePe raised an additional $200 million in seed capital from Walmart, as it plans to use these funds to build new scale businesses such as insurance, wealth management, lending, stockbroking, ONDC-based shopping, and account aggregators.
Founded in December 2015 by Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer, the PhonePe app is available in 11 Indian languages. Using PhonePe, users can send and receive money, recharge mobile, DTH and data cards, make utility payments, pay at shops, invest in tax saving funds and liquid funds, and buy insurance, mutual funds and digital gold.
Within three months of launch, the app was downloaded by over one million users. In 2018, PhonePe became the fastest Indian payment app to hit the five million mark in the Google Play Store. In January this year, the fintech startup declared the completion of its domicile shift to India and full separation from Flipkart. The company also announced a partnership with Cloudflare to secure the mobile transactions made through its services. In February, PhonePe became the first fintech platform to enable cross-border UPI payments.
