And It's Finally Here! Great News for Indian Android Developers!
"Starting today, developers in India can sell paid applications, in-app products, and subscriptions in Google Play, with monthly payouts to their local bank accounts. They can take advantage of all of the tools offered by Google Play to monetize their products in the best way for their businesses, and they can target their products to the paid ecosystem of hundreds of millions of users in India and across the world."
Elbouchikhi, Product Manager on the Google Play team, was the bearer of good news last night for Indian developers. Earlier this month, a mistake by the Google team of adding India to the list of countries with merchant account privileges caused a huge stir in the Indian app community. Subsequently, Google released a statement apologising for the mishap and said that it "had nothing to announce".
But one doesn't simply make these mistakes. Sources told us that the plan to introduce the account was under wraps and they were performing final tests before rolling it out.
The blog post announcing this news said "Over the past year, Android device activations in India have jumped more than 400%, bringing millions of new users to Google Play and driving huge increases in app downloads. In the last six months, Android users in India downloaded more apps than in the previous three years combined, and India has rocketed to become the fourth-largest market worldwide for app downloads. To help developers capitalize on this tremendous growth, we are launching Google Play seller support in India."
"This is great news" said an Indian Android developer "we can finally sell our apps and get paid for our work!"
Another great thing that can come out of this is the use of Net Banking and Debit card for purchase of paid apps through the market as banks Indian banks are now tied to Google accounts. This is not confirmed yet, and we have asked Google for a statement regarding this.
This is a great day for Indian App developers and for the Indian App ecosystem as such.
Read the official blog by Google here and watch this space for more updates.
