After a minor confusion and flip flop over the availability of Google Checkout in India, the official announcement regarding its availability was made yesterday. We already had expected before that Google would be making the announcement in the coming few weeks. This is of course great news for Indian developers who will be desperately looking forward to selling paid apps in the market.
In order to explain its decision to support India, the company gave some interesting statistics about the growing popularity of the Android platform in this country. It said in its blog that Android device activations have grown almost 400% in the last year and people have downloaded more apps in the last six months than the previous three years combined. They have thus projected India to be their fourth largest market for app downloads.
Besides this, Google has also enabled local currency payment in India which will allow developers to separately fix prices in the Indian Currency and let the users pay in Rupees. This move has also allowed Indian developers to use in-app payments and subscriptions. These can be enabled by logging in to the developer console and setting up a Google Checkout merchant account. Since existing free apps cannot be converted to paid, developers can only publish new paid apps. The only remaining wish would be the availability of other content like music, magazines, books, movies and TV series tailored for the Indian audience on the Play store. This would definitely seal the deal for Google in India.
