Google Play allows publication of paid Apps from India

Google Play allows publication of paid Apps from India

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.