Walmart-owned PhonePe on Wednesday launched Indus Appstore, a homegrown Android app store that will compete with Google Play Store, to Indian consumers in India.
The launch comes about four months after the digital payments firm opened up its app marketplace to Android developers, inviting them to publish their app on the platform.
Indus Appstore will be available in English and 12 Indian languages, which allows users to explore the app store in their preferred language.
With Indus Appstore, PhonePe aims to create more competitive and localized mobile app store economy for India, which is already the largest mobile apps download market globally.
Indians spent about 1.19 trillion hours on mobile apps in 2023, up from 954 billion hours in 2021, as per app intelligence firm data.ai. The country is also the world’s largest market in terms of app downloads.
“Indus Appstore allows Indian consumers to download over 2 lakh mobile apps and games, across 45 categories. Users will be able to discover these apps conveniently in 12 Indian languages, thereby catering to 95% of Indians’ language preferences. The app store also offers a brand new short-video based discovery feature, to make new app discovery more engaging for consumers, PhonePe said in a statement.