Vodafone India,one among India’s leading mobile service provider has now made a merger with Appia (an enterprise that powers a white-label content and commerce platform for everyone and anyone who needs a mobile app store) to launch a new mobile app store for the benefit and the ease of the carrier’s 145 million subscribers in India.
About Appia… Appia powers mobile app storefronts for more than 40 partners. This also includes four brands found amongst the top five in the world namely Samsung, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon Wireless. And company powers an App Stores for Opera Software and Telcel, Mexico’s largest operator. So what difference is Appia gonna make to Vodafone? The very basic fact that Appia’s white-label offering enables its partners to deliver apps to more than 3,200 different mobile device makes and models is more than enough to make all the change humanly possible.
According to the present proposal the Vodafone Application Store is filled with over 10,000 app titles for all kinds and types of smartphone platforms. Android, Java, Symbian and Blackberry being well incorporated into this humongous store. The catalog also includes an extensive collection of content from local providers, including Hungama, India Games, Nazara, Spice, and Vodafone-branded apps like Portfolio Tracker, Vodafone TV, and Chhota Comics. The store will include both free and paid apps.
“We are excited to partner with Appia to offer this new mobile Application Store to Vodafone subscribers,” said Kumar Ramanathan, Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone India Ltd. “The store will present the best the world has to offer in mobile applications, giving Vodafone subscribers an expansive catalog of games and apps to entertain and enrich their lives.”
Appia’s application discovery and distribution network provides all of the content for Vodafone’s mobile application storefront, as well as the end-to-end managed service platform for storefront merchandising and commerce. The store is optimized to match applications to each subscriber’s specific device, offering thousands of applications across all major mobile operating systems, thus making it one of the best amongst all operator apps stores in the country. Appia is seeing downloads from over 200 countries and 3,500 different handsets, and across all of its app stores, is averaging around 1 million app downloads a day. The company also recently took an investment from DCM’s $100 million A-Fund.
To enter the exciting world of Vodafone Application store, Vodafone customers can SMS “VStore” or “Apps” to 111 from their GPRS-enabled handsets and click on the URL in the response message. Customers can also log in to live.vodafone.in and click the Vstore link on the Vodafone Live homepage
