Aircel's Head of New Products & Innovation Sandeep Sawhney has said that relevancy of application stores in India is low and that the company would have been happy not to get into it. Speaking at a panel discussion at Mobile India 2010 recently, Sawhney said, "But we are democratising VAS. We are delighted to partner with Ovi or other platforms. We will support vendors working across operators," he said, adding that unless the price of smartphones comes to Rs. 5000, it was doubtful app stores would be successful. "We have a limited number of people, so when we sat down and envisaged the talent in our country, we decided to partner with Infosys. So you (developers) can go directly to them and not us," he said. Talking about the progress of the store, he said, "We are fairly advanced on the platform side. " He also indicated the app store would be launched in four to eight months' time and not next quarter. Earlier Story( Jan 6): Aircel is readying to launch the first operator-side Application Store in partnership with IT services firm Infosys. The app store will be available to users in 2-3 months, the Aircel spokesperson told MediaNama. The tie up between Infosys and Aircel signals a change in the market - it is no longer a handset manufacturer driven app store market, and can move into becoming an operator driven one - with 13 operators in the country, this could become interesting if replicated by competitors. This…
