Can You Replace the Google Play Store in India? (2026)

On 22 July 2026, Google began letting third-party American app stores offer Play's catalogue to their users — a remedy forced on it by a US court in the Epic case. Lower Play fees had already taken effect in the US, UK and Europe a few weeks earlier. India is in none of it.

That stings a little, because India got there first. The Competition Commission of India fined Google Rs 1,337.76 crore in October 2022 and ordered it to let rival app stores be distributed through the Play Store. Five months later, India's own appellate tribunal threw that direction out. So while an American now gets a choice of storefront by court order, an Indian who wants a different app store still downloads an APK.

Which raises the practical question this post is actually about: is there anything real to switch to, and is it safe?

TL;DR — the short answer

• There is one serious Indian app store: Indus Appstore, built by PhonePe. It's real (100 million devices as of September 2025) and preinstalled on Xiaomi and Lava phones sold in India, announced for Alcatel, and available on Motorola.
• If you own one of those phones, you already have it, and removing it ranges from fiddly to impossible — on Motorola you can only disable it. That is the single most common complaint about it.
• It complements Play rather than replacing it. Google's own apps, most big bank apps, Flipkart and CRED aren't on it, and there's no refund mechanism at all. Keep Play installed.
• Get it from indusappstore.com, opened on the phone itself. The real download link is generated on demand, so any fixed "latest version" URL you find elsewhere isn't the one Indus is serving.
• Everything else marketed as an "Indian app store" is dormant, offline, not on Android, or not Indian.

Indus Appstore

Indus Appstore is an Android app marketplace owned by PhonePe (majority-held by Walmart). It launched in February 2024, built on the team PhonePe acquired with Indus OS in 2022. The legal entity, Indus Appstore Private Limited, is registered in Chennai; PhonePe itself is based in Bengaluru.

The scale is genuine. As of September 2025, PhonePe reported Indus on 100 million devices with 80 million-plus users, of whom 70.6% are in Tier-3 regions and roughly 40% browse in an Indian language. Its own site advertises "5 lakh apps and counting" and availability in English plus 12 Indian languages. The homepage today enumerates 32 app categories and 17 game categories; the "45 categories" figure still doing the rounds is from the February 2024 launch press release. Voice search in 10 languages comes from an April 2024 announcement, not the current site.

The preinstall deals are the reason it has that reach:

OEM	Status
Xiaomi	Multi-year deal announced 13 March 2025 — Indus to replace GetApps on Xiaomi phones sold in India. The companies did not say whether existing devices would get it, only new ones
Lava	Preinstalled, per Indus's own site — among the earliest partners, announced 26 September 2023 (jointly with Nokia, which never shipped)
Alcatel	Announced 4 August 2025: Indus "will come pre-installed as an app store on all Alcatel smartphones in India". Alcatel only re-entered India in May 2025, so the installed base behind this is small
Motorola	Partnership announced December 2025; users report it arriving via a system update

As of today, Indus's own homepage still says it "comes pre-installed as the default appstore on Xiaomi and Lava smartphones" — its marketing hasn't caught up with its own press releases.

Two gaps in that list matter. The Samsung arrangement is over. Indus App Bazaar had powered the Galaxy Store's app feed since 2019; an Indus spokesperson has since said the store "no longer caters to the Samsung Galaxy Store". Neither company announced it, and as far as anyone has said on the record it was Indus that walked, while pivoting to its own consumer store. Worth being precise about what ended: it was a backend feed inside Samsung's storefront, never a preinstalled Indus app on Samsung phones. And there is no announced deal with vivo, OPPO or realme — three of the largest sellers in India.

What works well

• Regional-language discovery here is genuinely strong: twelve Indian languages, voice search in ten, video previews of apps. Around 40% of its users browse in a language other than English. Google Play does not match this in India, and it's the honest reason Indus exists rather than a patriotic one. Kartik Menon, a product manager who published a hands-on teardown on Medium on 7 April 2024 — six weeks after launch — put it this way: "I found the app discoverability and cataloguing better here as opposed to what one gets on Playstore where categorizations and recommendations were slightly all over the interface."
• Sign in with a mobile number. No Google account, no email address needed.
• Zero listing fee and zero commission for developers. Indus runs no billing system of its own. Developers bring their own payment gateway, so there is nothing for Indus to take a cut of. On Google Play, an Indian developer currently pays 15% on the first $1M of annual revenue and 30% above it (11%/26% if they use user-choice billing). Two caveats before you plan a business around it: the launch waiver was announced as free only until 1 April 2025, and that date passed with no charge and no announced extension; and Clause III of the developer terms reserves Indus's right "to levy upon You fees and other charges… after providing a prior notification." So it's free today, not free by commitment.
• Malware scanning at ingest. Indus says it scans through OPSWAT MetaDefender Core with seven antivirus engines including Bitdefender, McAfee and CrowdStrike, at onboarding, at every update, and on periodic rescans of live apps, with the system refreshed every four hours and failing apps removed. That's the company's own account — no independent security audit of Indus has been published.
• Play Protect keeps working. Google Play Protect is on-device and continuous, and by Google's own documentation it "checks your device for potentially harmful apps from other sources". Installing from Indus adds a scanning layer; it doesn't remove Google's. Treat it as a real layer that determined malware can still defeat — keep it on, don't treat it as sufficient.

Watch out for

• On many phones you can't remove it — only disable it. This dominates real user feedback and it isn't in most reviews. On Motorola and Xiaomi devices Indus arrives through a system update as a system-level app. Indus says so itself, in its own FAQ: "As it is an integrated system app, it cannot be fully uninstalled." (Xiaomi and Redmi owners have found a way around it with a third-party file manager — see the FAQ at the end. Motorola owners haven't.) When a Moto Edge 60 Pro owner complained about this in February 2026, Motorola's official Reddit support account gave the practical version: "We understand how unexpected it can be to see a new app appear on your phone, especially when there's no clear option to remove it. You can disable it so it no longer runs or appears in your app screen by going to: Settings > Apps > Indus Appstore > Disable." That is the fix — there is no uninstall. Users also report it running in the background, and notification settings switching themselves back on: "when you disable the notifications by this app, it gets automatically turn on somehow."
• Google's own apps aren't there. We checked by requesting each app's package page on Indus directly, not by using the site's search — the search box is unreliable, returning zero results even for WhatsApp, which is plainly there with over 91,000 ratings. Probed that way: YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Photos, the Google app, Docs and Google Pay all return "not found" — 7 out of 7. Most large bank apps are missing too (ICICI iMobile, SBI YONO, Kotak 811, Axis Mobile, BoB World, HDFC Bank — public and private sector alike), as are Flipkart — despite Flipkart and PhonePe sharing Walmart as a parent — and CRED.
• There are no refunds. At all. Indus's consumer terms contain no refund, cancellation or chargeback mechanism. What they say instead is that when you buy content you enter a separate agreement with the publisher, and payment problems go to the publisher, your bank or your payment provider. Indus isn't in the payment loop — which is the direct, unadvertised cost of the zero-commission model.
• Listed apps are often not the current build. The mechanism itself is fine: Indus does push updates automatically, without manual intervention, per its own terms. The problem is developer adoption, and Indus concedes it in its own FAQ: "If an app version appears outdated, it is typically because the developer has not yet released the latest update specifically for the Indus Appstore platform." Menon hit this in that same April 2024 teardown: "As a test, I downloaded the Blinkit app and proceeded to check the version installed. It mentioned that a newer version of the app was available for download but when I clicked on it, it prompted me to go to Playstore and update the app! Now, this in many ways defeats the purpose of having downloaded the app through a separate app store."
• The review base is thin. From Indus's own listing data: WhatsApp has around 91,500 ratings there, PhonePe 30,700, Netflix 2,200, and Swiggy just 639. The same apps carry millions of ratings on Google Play.
• The catalogue is smaller than advertised. Indus claims 5 lakh apps. Its own sitemap, across all 16 shards, lists 314,105 distinct app pages — roughly 63% of the claim, and that's an upper bound, since a sample of those URLs returns 404. A sitemap isn't a contract, but the gap is worth knowing.
• It's Android-only. No iOS version, and no PC or desktop version — if you're searching for an Indus Appstore download for PC, there isn't one.
• It's not on Google Play and never will be. Google doesn't allow rival storefronts inside Play, so the first install is always a sideload with a browser warning you have to override.

One more thing, stated flatly and without a conclusion drawn from it: Indus's public numbers haven't moved since September 2025, all three co-founders have now left the company, PhonePe paused its IPO in March 2026 (its own word — the draft filing stands), and Indus hasn't issued a press release since December 2025.

Pricing: Free | Indus Appstore on SwadeshiApps

Is the Indus Appstore APK safe — and where do I get it?

Short answer: the app itself is legitimate. The real risk is what you might download while looking for it.

Take it from indusappstore.com, opened on the phone itself. Indus doesn't publish a tidy download URL — /download, /apk and the other obvious guesses all redirect to a 404 page. What works is the button on the homepage on an Android device, or the QR code on the site: both land on /steps-to-install?downloadApk=true, and that page asks Indus's own docstore for the current APK URL and serves you the file. So a direct link does exist — it's generated on demand rather than published, which is the point. The URL sitting on some third-party page is not the one Indus is serving today.

Two things the site doesn't put in front of you. The build you get from the web is a beta — at the time of writing, IndusAppStore_26.07.14.6_BETA.apk, about 51 MB, signed with a certificate valid to November 2026. And APKMirror does carry signature-verified Indus builds, so "there is no mirror" would be too strong. What's still true is that "indus app store apk latest version" is exactly the kind of search fake-APK sites farm, and starting from indusappstore.com means you never have to judge which mirror is the real one.

Why be careful? Because in India, APKs delivered over messaging apps are the main mobile banking fraud vector, and that is well documented:

• Zimperium's zLabs reported in February 2025 on FatBoyPanel (the threat actor, not the campaign itself) behind around 900 related malware samples affecting an estimated 50,000 users, with 222 exposed Firebase buckets holding 2.5GB of intercepted bank SMS, credentials, and the Aadhaar and PAN numbers victims typed into its fake forms. The apps it impersonated were led by ICICI (15.2% of samples), Punjab National Bank (12.9%), RBL (11.9%), SBI and IndusInd (10.5% each), with HDFC and Axis well down the list, plus the PM Kisan scheme. It spread through WhatsApp as APK files.
• In June 2026, PIB Fact Check warned about WhatsApp messages impersonating the RBI with APK attachments claiming account suspension. The RBI does not distribute apps that way.
• The Income Tax "iAssist" APK carrying Drinik malware, first reported in October 2022, went further and disabled Play Protect — but only after the victim granted it Accessibility Service. That's the chain worth understanding: Play Protect is a real layer, and it can be switched off by malware you have already handed the keys to. Keep it on, don't treat it as sufficient. It's also exactly the chain Android's restricted settings later closed off.

Google announced enhanced fraud protection for India on 3 October 2024, rolling out from the following month. Its stated rationale was that for major fraud malware families, "over 95 percent of installations came from Internet-sideloading sources". That's the honest counterweight to this entire post: sideloading in India genuinely is the main malware route. Which is why the safe way to do it is worth spelling out.

What you'll actually see when you install Indus, in its own words:

1. "Tap on Download Anyway" — this is Chrome flagging the download, and you overriding it. It's normal for any non-Play APK, and it is not a sign something is wrong.
2. "Tap Open to Install the APK file"
3. "Tap Settings to allow to install"
4. "Tap Switch to allow APK to install"
5. "Tap Install to allow APK to install"

Then turn "install unknown apps" back off for your browser. That one step is what stops the next dodgy link from installing something quietly.

Android 13 and later apply restricted settings to sideloaded apps: an app installed outside an app store can't be granted the most abusable permissions until you open its App info page and explicitly unblock them. On Android 13 and 14 that covered Accessibility and Notification Listener only; Android 15 widened it to device admin, screen overlay, usage access and SMS. (Google documents this in its consumer help centre — support.google.com/android/answer/12623953 — not in the developer docs, which is why it gets described wrongly so often.) And a permission request for reading SMS or Accessibility from any app that has no business needing it is a stop signal, not a hurdle to click past; those are precisely the permissions OTP-stealing trojans want.

Basic rules worth keeping

1. Never install an APK that arrived as a link — WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or email. That's the delivery route in essentially every documented Indian banking-trojan campaign.
2. No bank and no government department distributes an app as an APK attachment. Ever.
3. Leave Play Protect on.

Can it actually replace the Play Store?

No — and it's more useful to say exactly what you'd give up.

• Google's apps aren't on it. YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Photos, Docs, Google Pay: all absent. Nor are most big bank apps, Flipkart or CRED.
• Builds go stale, because developers don't consistently publish current versions to Indus.
• No refund path exists. If a purchase goes wrong, you're dealing with the publisher or your bank.
• Nothing migrates. Paid apps, purchase history and subscriptions stay with Play.

The realistic answer is to run both. Use Indus for discovery in your own language and for what it carries; keep Play as the default updater and for anything Google-, bank- or payment-related. If you're on a Xiaomi or Lava phone — or a Motorola that got it in a system update — you're already running both whether you chose to or not.

What else is there? An honest audit

This is the part where most "Indian app store" listicles pad the list. Here's the actual state of the field.

BharOS — a secure Android fork from an IIT Madras-incubated firm, launched with two Union ministers in January 2023. Its app store component, PASS, is explicitly organisation-specific: a curated catalogue vetted for an organisation's security standards. It was never designed as a consumer app store, it stayed closed source, and a 2023 provenance row surfaced code derived from GrapheneOS. A promised Lava handset never shipped. The last substantive news was an MoU signed on 16 February 2024 with the PSU ITI Limited to manufacture BharOS devices — nothing shipped from it. A normal person cannot install it today.

The government's own app store is offline. The Mobile Seva AppStore at apps.mgov.gov.in — once promoted as India's first indigenously developed app store — does not resolve at all. Its domain returns NXDOMAIN, meaning the name simply doesn't exist, while the parent mgov.gov.in resolves fine. The government still links to the dead subdomain from a page whose copyright reads 2022, and C-DAC's National AppStore page still points at it too.

Jio — has app stores, none of them on Android phones. JioStore exists on KaiOS feature phones and on the Jio set-top box, and JioTele OS for smart TVs shipped in February 2025 with its own store. But JioPhone Next, Jio's one Android handset, ran Pragati OS co-built with Google and shipped with the Google Play Store. Reliance's 2025 and 2026 AGMs announced no app store. (Ignore any "Jio Apps Store APK" page you find — those aren't Reliance products.)

Amazon Appstore — shut down. Amazon announced the end of its Android app store in February 2025 and closed it on 20 August 2025; apps installed from it aren't guaranteed to keep working. It survives only on Fire TV and Fire tablets. Any 2026 listicle recommending it is a year out of date.

Samsung Galaxy Store — not Indian, but it's preinstalled on roughly one in six phones sold in India, which makes it the largest actually-usable Play alternative here by reach. And Samsung is competing harder, not retreating: from May 2025 developers keep 80% of revenue and 85% on subscriptions.

F-Droid — not Indian either, but it's the genuine open-source option, and it's under real pressure. Google's incoming developer-verification rules conflict with how F-Droid works: it builds apps from source and signs them with its own key, which Google's package-ownership model doesn't accommodate. In February 2026 F-Droid was one of the co-signers of an open letter opposing the policy, published at keepandroidopen.org and signed by the EFF, the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Software Freedom Conservancy and dozens of others. Its honest limitations are unrelated to that fight: a much smaller catalogue with no mainstream proprietary apps, and update lag from rebuilding everything from source.

APKMirror, APKPure and Aptoide are not app stores — and this is worth being blunt about, because they show up on every list like this one. APKMirror verifies that a file's signature matches the original developer's, which proves provenance, not safety; it runs no malware analysis. APKPure's own client app shipped Triada-family malware in a bundled ad SDK in April 2021, found by Kaspersky. Aptoide does claim vetting — "Aptoide Sentinel" malware scanning, developer-signature validation, and Trusted/Warning/Unknown badges on listings — but anyone can publish their own store on it, and that open model has repeatedly been used to distribute malware. Use all three to retrieve a specific known app version if you must, not as a place to browse.

Why India is still stuck with sideloading

The regulatory story explains why none of this got easier, and it's worth telling accurately because a lot of what circulates about it is wrong.

In October 2022 the CCI issued two orders: Rs 1,337.76 crore over the Android ecosystem, with ten behavioural directions, and Rs 936.44 crore over Play Store billing. Among those ten directions were the two that mattered here — that Google must allow third-party app stores to be distributed through Play, and that it must not restrict sideloading.

On 29 March 2023, NCLAT upheld the Rs 1,337.76 crore penalty in full but set aside four of the ten directions, including both of those. That, more than anything Google did, is why an Indian still sideloads in 2026.

What followed was a demonstration of the imbalance. Google issued its warning on 29 February 2024 and on 1 March 2024 delisted more than 100 apps from Indian companies — BharatMatrimony, Shaadi.com, Info Edge's Naukri and 99acres, Kuku FM and others — over unpaid service fees. IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw convened the parties and said publicly that "this kind of delisting cannot be permitted". The apps came back. But the companies paid, and Google said it would invoice its full fees for the interim regardless. The startups lost that round; what they got was a fresh CCI probe in March 2024.

Since then: NCLAT cut the Play-billing penalty to Rs 216.69 crore in March 2025, and cross-appeals from Google, the CCI and ADIF are pending before the Supreme Court. The Draft Digital Competition Bill of 2024, which would have regulated app stores directly, has gone backwards rather than forwards. Public consultation closed on 15 May 2024; in August 2025 a parliamentary panel recommended the bill be withdrawn and redrafted; and in November 2025 the Ministry of Corporate Affairs put out an RFP for a fresh study on how to define the platforms it would cover. There is no timeline for a revived bill.

Meanwhile Google's 2026 opening is real but geographically narrow. Lower fees took effect in the US, EEA and UK from 30 June 2026. The Play Catalog Access Program went live on 22 July 2026 — and note the precise shape of it, because headlines get this wrong: third-party US app stores can offer Play's apps, the download still completes through Google Play, and Google still collects its service fee. It's catalogue access, not rival storefronts inside Play. India isn't mentioned anywhere in it, and catalogue access has no announced extension here at all.

The fees do have a published date for India, and it's a long wait. Google's own timetable puts India in the "Rest of World" bucket, where the lower fees arrive on 30 September 2027 — fifteen months behind the US, UK and EEA.

One thing may move faster in the other direction. Android developer verification begins enforcement on 30 September 2026 — in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand only — and Google says it will expand globally in 2027. India isn't in that first wave either, but it is in "globally". So the friction described in this post could get worse before it gets better — with one announcement pointing the other way.

The one change that could reach India first

On 4 March 2026 Google announced a Registered App Stores programme: third-party stores that qualify get a streamlined install flow instead of the full sideload gauntlet — no digging through "install unknown apps" for each one. Google says it ships with a major Android release by the end of 2026 and, unusually, that it will roll out outside the US first.

That's the most India-relevant thing in this whole story, and it cuts against the rest of it. Nothing announced so far names India, and "outside the US first" is not the same as "India at launch" — but for the first time the friction this post spends most of its length describing has a Google-shipped fix pointed in India's direction rather than away from it. It doesn't touch the fee gap, and it doesn't put rival stores inside Play. It would make installing Indus, or F-Droid, materially less awkward. Worth watching when the next Android release lands.

Quick comparison

	Indus Appstore	Google Play	Samsung Galaxy Store	F-Droid
Indian?	Yes (PhonePe)	No	No	No
Preinstalled on	Xiaomi, Lava (India); announced for Alcatel; available on Motorola	Almost every Android phone	Samsung phones (~1 in 6 sold in India)	Nothing
Catalogue	~306,000 app pages listed (counted 17 Sep 2026, down from ~314,000 in August); "5 lakh" claimed	Millions	Not published	Small, FOSS only
Developer cut	0% listing, 0% commission (no billing system)	15% / 30% in India	20% (15% on subscriptions)	0%, donations only
How you install it	Sideload the APK from indusappstore.com	Already there	Already there on Samsung	Sideload from f-droid.org

Bottom line

If you're on a Xiaomi or Lava phone — or a Motorola that picked it up in a system update — Indus Appstore is already there, and getting rid of it is anywhere from fiddly to impossible, so you may as well know what it's good at. If you browse in an Indian language, it's genuinely the best app discovery on Android in India right now.

Don't uninstall Play. Indus is missing Google's apps, most big bank apps, Flipkart and CRED, and it has no refund mechanism, so it's a second store, not a replacement.

And take the APK from indusappstore.com on the phone itself — never from a link someone sent you.

The bigger fix isn't an app you install. Two things could move it: India's regulators getting Google to concede here what an American court already made it concede there — which, on the current evidence, is slow — or Google's own Registered App Stores programme reaching India when it rolls out, which would at least make choosing a different store less of an ordeal. Neither is settled. The first is the one that would actually change the terms.

Frequently asked questions

Is Indus Appstore safe? The store itself is legitimate — it's a PhonePe product, preinstalled by Xiaomi, Lava and Alcatel and available on Motorola devices in India, and Indus says every app is scanned through seven antivirus engines at onboarding and on every update. Play Protect also keeps scanning apps you install from it. The real risk is downloading a fake Indus APK from a lookalike site, so start from indusappstore.com.

Where do I download the Indus Appstore APK? Open indusappstore.com in a browser on the Android phone itself and use the download button, or scan the QR code on the site. Both route through Indus's install page, which fetches the current signed APK URL from Indus's own servers — so the file is a genuine direct download, it's just not a fixed address you can bookmark or find quoted elsewhere. Note that the web build is a beta channel release. APKMirror does host signature-verified Indus builds if you need a specific older version, but for a first install, going to indusappstore.com means you never have to work out which "latest version" page is real.

Is Indus Appstore on the Google Play Store? No, and it won't be. Google doesn't permit rival app stores inside Play, so the first install is always a sideload.

Can I use Indus Appstore on a PC? No. It's Android-only — there is no PC, Windows or iOS version.

How do I update apps installed from Indus? Indus pushes updates automatically without you doing anything, and you can change that in the profile section of its settings. The catalogue is the real catch: if a developer hasn't published a current build to Indus, the app there stays on an older version and may prompt you to update via Play instead.

Can I uninstall Indus Appstore? If you installed it yourself from the APK, yes — it uninstalls normally. If it arrived preinstalled or through a system update, usually not: Indus's own FAQ says "as it is an integrated system app, it cannot be fully uninstalled", and the only thing it suggests instead is logging out. On Motorola that really is the end of it — Motorola's support account points users to Settings > Apps > Indus Appstore > Disable, and GSMArena found the same on the Edge 70 Fusion, where Facebook and Instagram uninstall but Indus doesn't. On many Xiaomi and Redmi phones there is a way round it: a third-party file manager (CX File Explorer > Apps > search "Indus") removes both Indus Appstore and Indus Services without root or ADB, and GetApps comes back. It can reappear after a later system update, and it doesn't work on Poco or Motorola devices.

Also see: Indian alternatives to the Google Play Store and Indian alternatives to the Apple App Store for the full app listings. If you're trying to reduce Google's footprint on your phone more broadly, JioSphere and Ulaa are Indian browser options, and PhonePe — the company behind Indus — is listed too.