All Xiaomi phones in India to use PhonePe's Indus Appstore from January 2025: Report

All Xiaomi phones in India will get the update automatically. Xiaomi claims it shipped over 250 million smartphones since starting its India operations in 2014.

Published on: Nov 19, 2024, 13:28:05 IST

By HT News Desk

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Chinese smartphone and electronics maker Xiaomi will be replacing GetApps, its mobile app marketplace, with the Indus Appstore which is owned by PhonePe-owned, according to a Moneycontrol report.

A man walks past a logo of Xiaomi, a Chinese manufacturer of consumer electronics, outside a shop in Mumbai, (Reuters)

This will only be in India and will start from January 2025, the report cited an in-app notice shown to users as saying.

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However, all Xiaomi phones sold in India will get this update automatically in that time. Xiaomi claims to have shipped over 250 million smartphones and another 100 million devices since starting operations in India in 2014.

This comes at a time when the homegrown Indus Appstore debuted a new version of its app marketplace with richer visuals and user interface tweaks along with some other changes. It aims to challenge the dominance of the Google Play Store.

The Walmart-backed PhonePe launched the Indus Appstore in February this year amid a standoff between Google and some of the country’s top startups and internet firms over the Google's Play Store policies and commission fees.

The Indus Appstore's key selling point is the 0% fee on in-app purchases compared to the 15-30% fee levied by Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store.

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Developers can also integrate any third-party payment gateway of their choice for in-app billing and the store won't levy any fee for these transactions.

The store also allows developers to list apps in 12 Indian languages apart from English, as well as upload media and videos to their app listings in those languages.

At the moment, the Indus Appstore is only available on the company’s website, where users can download and manually install it on their smartphones.

It claims to have surpassed one million installs within a month of its launch.

The partnership with brands like Xiaomi will be important for its adoption primarily because users aren't always willing to go the extra mile and manually install it themselves.

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HT News Desk
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