Google is hoping to bring in a large cross section of developers in India on to the Android ecosystem. |
Google Play, the Apps market for Android mobile operating system, has
added India as one of the countries from where developers could publish
paid Apps.
Until now, developers in India were permitted to put out only free
Applications. This severely affected the business models of developers,
as there was no incentive to put out innovative Apps.
With the extension of rights now, Google is hoping to bring in a large
cross section of developers in the country on to the Android ecosystem.
``The move was overdue for some time now,’’ said Ashish Sinha, founder
of Pluggd.in, one of the prominent websites focused on local start-ups.
“This will pave the way for creating business models around innovative
Apps. Android is big in the Indian smart devices space, and this will
help fuel development of the localised Apps, too,” he added.
Until now, developers were figuring out ways to circumvent the
restriction. In some cases, this meant having to travel to the U.S. to
create a local bank account there in the name of relatives and friends
or even floating a company there for this purpose.
On its official Google Developer support page — https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer
— Google listed India as one of the countries from where developers
could register as Google Check-out merchants and sell paid
Applications.
Next Wave Multimedia in Chennai, which has published more than 10 Apps
each on both the Apple iTunes and the Android Marketplace over past
three years, was one of the early entrants in the mobile Apps space.
The company’s director P. R. Rajendran said: “We have lived with this
condition for some time now where we literally run two companies, and
are subject to dual taxation.
This is a welcome move on the part of Google,” he said.
N. Madhumathi, who runs e-learning service Empower, said the barrier was
one of the reasons why her company could not launch its Android app
‘Videos to Learn’ that had e-learning packages for school and college
students.
“It was not viable for a small company like ours to launch operations in
the U.S. just to put the App on Google Play. Besides, our App is
India-specific in content. This will only help us now.”
The developer community plays a vital role in the booming smart device
ecosystems. Android claims to have over 6.50 lakh Apps in its Google
Play directory while Apple claims to have more than seven lakh Apps on
iTunes.