India has abundant opportunities for smartphone manufacturers and who would know it better than Samsung, which lost its lead in the country to biggest competitor Xiaomi last year. As Samsung competes to regain its dominance over the competition with new and much affordable devices including those in the Galaxy M and Galaxy A series, it is looking to attract consumers in the smaller towns in the country. As part of the endeavor, Samsung has announced a special "Make in India" version of its Galaxy Apps Store that supports a dozen of Indic languages with an objective to help Indian users download and experience more apps.

Samsung has partnered with Indus App Bazaar allowing its users in India to browse apps in their native language instead of in English. Indus App Bazaar is a part of IndusOS, an indigenously-created mobile operating system which is based on Android and promotes inclusion of users from smaller towns and cities in India. Both the Indus App Bazaar and the OS support 12 Indic languages apart from English to facilitate downloading of apps for Indian users. The same is being extended to the Galaxy Apps Store.

indus app store samsung galaxy app store Credit: A glimpse of Indus App Store

The languages now supported in the Galaxy Apps Store include Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu apart from English. Apart from support for multiple languages, the Samsung Galaxy Apps Store has also borrowed personalized results from the IndusOS store and these personalized app recommendations will be sent to the users even without signing up. The Galaxy Apps Store will also highlight apps by Indian developers to promote their endeavor under the government's "Startup India".

Google Play Store in Hindi Credit: Google Play Store in Hindi

However, Google is not far behind when it comes to supporting Indic languages on Google Play Store natively. In fact, if you set the default language of your smartphone to any Indic language, the content in the Google Play Store will change too. You can see the Google Play Store with my smartphone's default language set to Hindi.

Furthermore, Google has been working to offer greater support to Indian users by adding as many as eight regional languages in Google Assistant. Recently, Google also launched an app called Bolo (Hindi for "speak") which helps Indian children learn how to read Hindi and English by using a teleprompter-like interface.