Startups In India Want To Build Their Own App Store To Bypass Google’s

Dozens of prominent startups in India, one of the world’s largest internet markets, are creating a coalition to fight a Google decision that would require them to give 30% of in-app payments to the tech giant beginning next year.

On Tuesday, nearly 60 executives from dozens of Indian companies kicked off preliminary discussions, three people familiar with the talks told BuzzFeed News.

The coalition, which will include multibillion-dollar companies like payments giant Paytm, online ticketing firm MakeMyTrip, and local social networks like ShareChat among others, wants to fight Silicon Valley’s increasing influence on the Indian internet, lobby the Indian government on behalf of homegrown startups, and set up an Indian app store as an alternative way to the Google Play store.

Last month after Google pulled Paytm, a payment app used by more than 350 million people and India’s highest-valued startup at over $16 billion, from the Play store, its billionaire founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma expressed displeasure about an American company controlling access to customers in India. “No foreign company should control the destiny of Indian startups,” he said in an interview.

Sharma did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.

The move spooked Indian startups and raised questions about how much control Google had over the country’s internet.

Around the world, developers have pushed back against Apple and Google, accusing them of using their monopolies over the App Store and the Google Play store to collect unreasonable commissions.

Last week, Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, which both Apple and Google recently kicked off their platforms for bypassing the companies’ payment systems, Spotify, the Match Group, which owns Tinder, and others, launched a nonprofit called the Coalition for App Fairness to push the companies to change their app store policies.

The Indian coalition doesn’t have a name yet and discussions are still in the early stages, according to people with knowledge of the matter, but the spirit is the same. “The form and structure of this coalition is yet to be determined,” Vishal Gondal, founder and CEO of GOQii, a health and fitness startup that plans to be part of the coalition, told BuzzFeed News. “But clearly Google has invited this on itself.”