India has been removed from Google’s updated list of countries where application developers can sell paid applications on its Android app market, Play Store.
A couple of days ago, there were reports that the company had included India and a few more countries such as Czech Republic, Israel, Poland and Mexico in the list of countries that are supported for distributing paid apps in Play Store. The company, however, had not made any official announcement on the same.
India, however, is no longer in the list of countries where developers can publish paid applications in Google Play. Google Play is the official application store for Android operating system from which devices with Android OS allowed to download applications. Over 600,000 Android applications are available in Google Play, according to available data.
On being asked, a spokesperson of the company in India said, “Google does not have anything to announce at this point of time.”
Industry sources say that the company might have included India erroneously. Because, Indian developers were not able to setup merchant accounts in Google Checkout which is a must for selling paid applications, even though India was showing in the list of supported locations for merchants.
Allowing of Indian developers to sell paid Android apps could have been a huge boost for the developers’ community, which is said to be the second largest after the US. The increasing interest of Indian developers to develop applications on mobile and PC platforms can be gauged from the fact that Windows 8 AppFest, a non-stop coding marathon organised by Microsoft last week witnessed close to 2,600 participations.
