PhonePe Launches Indus Appstore To Take On Google, Apple

Taking on Google Play Store and Apple App Store, fintech giant PhonePe on Wednesday (February 21) launched its Android app marketplace Indus Appstore.

In a statement, the company said that the platform hosts more than 2 Lakh apps across 45 categories. Several Indian brands, including Zomato, Myntra, Domino’s, Flipkart, Dream11, Swiggy among others have published their apps on Indus Appstore.

The marketplace will be available in English and 12 Indian languages and will offer “no app listing fees” for developers till March 2025.

Commenting on the launch, PhonePe cofounder and CEO Sameer Nigam said, “Indus Appstore challenges the status quo, ushering in an era of more healthy competition in the mobile app marketplace, which in turn should help create a more democratic and vibrant Indian digital ecosystem.” 

The new platform was launched at an event in New Delhi, which saw presence of IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, former NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, Info Edge founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani, and several startup founders, including Dream Sports’ Harsh Jain and ixigo’s Aloke Bajpai. 

In what will have a direct bearing on Google and Apple, PhonePe said that app and game developers listed on Indus Appstore will be free to use any third-party payment gateway for in-app billing. The company also noted that developers will not be charged commissions for using an external payment gateway. 

Going forward, the platform intends to roll out “optional” in-app billing and catalogue solutions for developers. 

Indus Appstore’s Monetisation Plan

Thus far, Indus Appstore has insisted that it won’t charge developers a listing fee for the first year, and while Nigam did admit that there would be some commissions in the future, these would be relatively nominal and lower than existing commissions charged by Google and Apple.

“The primary focus will be on advertising, where developers would pay us to improve discovery of the apps, but this is not a mandate for developers. They can choose to not pay us if they want to leverage organic growth,” Nigam said.

The Appstore plans to make most of its money from the advertising side and Nigam said that the objective of the platform is to drive discovery of apps and download of apps. “And if that’s the northstar, then we should be able to monetize app downloads or app traffic growth or better retention and those kinds of solutions. We should not be monetizing on the other end of the spectrum, which is usage,” the PhonePe CEO added.

The other monetisation strategy is catalouging services which would offered as an add-on to developers. Indus Appstore plans to develop cataloguing services such as payment solutions, mandate solutions for recurring payments, sachet solutions for small-ticket transactions. These will be offered a la carte to app developers, without any specific mandate that they have to use them.

Indus Appstore Vs Tech Giants

As for bringing apps on board, the CEO and the Indus team were clear that this would take several months for the app store to be populated fully. “Right now, we are aggregating apps from a bunch of app platforms that actually do this level of aggregation. So we’ve got a two lakh apps or so right now. We’re hoping to drive that number up significantly in the next few weeks,” said Akash Dongre, who is leading the Indus Appstore business.

Indus Appstore’s developer platform was launched in September last year and the company claims to have brought a lot of developers on board already. Some of the larger apps are testing the Appstore platform directly and signing manual agreements, Dongre added.

With this, Indus Appstore is eyeing to grab a pie of the Indian app market from giants such as Google and Apple. The move to embed third-party billing solutions and zero commissions for a year comes at a time when Google is locked in a tussle with Indian startups over the commissions charged by the former and implementation of its new user choice billing system. 

Google Play Store charges commissions in a range of 11-26% and recently introduced a third-party billing system under the new policy. However, Indian startups have been opposing the new policy as they believe that they will have to sign up for additional paperwork to use external payment gateways. It is this gap that PhonePe wants to fill. 

The launch comes nearly two years after PhonePe acquired the parent company of Indus Appstore in May 2022 for $90 Mn. It was originally cofounded by Rakesh Deshmukh, Akash Dongre and Sudhir Bangarambandi. While Dongre and Bangarambandi are still working with the app marketplace, Deshmuk resigned in January this year.

With this launch, PhonePe aims to grab a market share in India’s burgeoning app economy. As per a report, Indians spent almost 1.1 Tn hours on mobile apps in 2023 against 800 Bn hours in 2022. 

The country emerged as the second biggest source of app downloads in the world with 26.4 Bn downloads in 2023. Indians also spent an average of 4.77 hours a day on their phones, much higher than users in the US, UK, Japan, or China. 

As per a report by the Broadband India Forum, the homegrown app economy could potentially be worth nearly 12% of India’s GDP by 2030.