Google’s Android OS has finally crossed Nokia’s Symbian OS as the most shipped and most famous OS in the world. With this many more opportunities begin for upcoming Android centric phones as well as app developers in this field. For a country like India where the app industry is still in the nascent stage, there has been a keen interest in this field over the last couple of years. Various organizations have started developing apps, some for Blackberry, some for i-Phone and some others for the Symbian platform.
Despite the fact that Android is the number 1 in the world right now, Symbian is still leading in the country because of Nokia’s trust still making it sit at around 28% market share. But by 2014, Android OS is expected to cross Symbian in India too. And taking this into consideration, Webonise Labs has announced its plans to open an India–centric only Android app store.
This app store promises to develop apps which are completely India centric from Bollywood Masala apps to religious apps to even cricket apps. Everything about the app store will signify a sense of Indian-ness. You can say that this is an attempt to Indianise whatever is being offered in the world currently.
But what’s the big deal? Are they the first ones in this space? Isn’t this space fraught with competition considering the presence of Aircel, Airtel, Amazon and many more? How will third party apps protect themselves from viruses and different kinds of malware? All these questions are swirling in your mind, aren’t they?
There are two ways to look at this industry. The biggest entry barrier is that one has to have the technological savvy mind and competency to develop such kind of apps. And the second and more important thing is that one needs to always make sure that developing apps and sharing and downloading thing always involves the community. Without a proper community interaction and development, this can completely fail.
The biggies like Aircel, Airtel etc. compete in the horizontal space across various platforms. But Webonise aims to establish its core competency in the vertical space in Android itself. It is aiming for various ways of distribution. The most prominent are the Indian App Developer contest which can help ensure the right quality for apps and community sharing and also pre installing their apps in various new handsets. For pre-installations they already seem to be in talks with a couple of handset brands. With the app developers contest, they can also eradicate the problem of malwares affecting their apps like other third party developers.
Since people are not always too ready to pay for such apps having a proper revenue source for App Bazar may be difficult. It would be interesting to see how Webonise tackles that issue.
Till then, let’s keep our fingers crossed for probably the first India centric Android App Bazar!