Xiaomi Uses PhonePe’s App Store for India Smartphones

Starting in January, Xiaomi customers in India will no longer be able to use its app shop

Instead, they will be able to use PhonePe’s. The Chinese hardware giant is getting ready to change things up even more in one of its biggest markets outside China. This is good news for the Indian company.

Xiaomi is the second biggest smartphone maker in India, after Vivo. Over the weekend, the company told its customers that it would automatically push the update to their devices in India to replace GetApps with PhonePe’s Indus AppStore.

A customer note seen by TechCrunch said, “The GetApps team will continue to offer app installation and support services under the name Indus Services App.”

Since it started doing business in India in 2013, Xiaomi has sent over 250 million smartphones and another 100 million other gadgets there. Xiaomi had a good start in India but has had some problems since then. Since there was an incident about sending money illegally, the company shut down its financial services business in 2022. China and India are at odds with each other, so its market share has gone down, and there have been a lot of changes in its top leadership.

With money from partners like Walmart, General Atlantic, and Tiger Global, PhonePe opened the Indus AppStore in February to compete with Google’s monopoly in India, which has more Android users than any other country. (Notably, Vivo users can get apps from its own V-Appstore and Google Play, the official Android store.)

In India, as in many other parts of the world, businesses have been upset about Google’s “excessive” fees of up to 30% on app purchases over the past few years. They have also said that the company that makes Android doesn’t let third-party in-app payments work on the Play Store.

There is no fee when you put your app on PhonePe’s Indus AppStore for the first year. The store also supports third-party payment providers, local languages, and customer service.