Dubai: When you think of mobile app stores, you will probably think of Google, Apple, Windows, Blackberry and Amazon. But there is one Android store that is slowly gaining traction — Mobogenie.
Mobogenie develops applications for the Android platform and mobile device management applications for PC.
“It is developed in India by an Indian team and we are primarily a gaming company and it is our DNA. When we wanted to launch certain mobile games in India in March 2013, we found it was difficult to download mobile gaming apps as there are too many apps and limited number of app stores,” Rahul Srivastava, senior marketing and operations director at Mobogenie, told Gulf News.
To list your apps on the play stores, he said there are stringent procedures and there is no one to talk to you and everything is automated by a computer. So that forced us to create our own platform. First we made it in on PC and now on mobile devices.
Available in more than 30 languages and with offices in Silicon Valley, Latin America, Asia and Middle East, Mobogenie is supported both locally and globally.
He said the key features are — transfer files from your Android to your PC and from your PC to your Android; backup contacts, messages, apps, music, images and videos; restore backed up data to any brand.
“There is no single vendor which supports multiple brand backup,” he said.
Mobogenie had 200 million users in 2013 and now has 450 million users from 252 countries, out of which 55 million are from the Middle East. It has got close to 1.1 million apps listed on its platform.
“We released Middle East offers huge growth potential after the success in India and, at the same time, Middle East is also the most neglected market. First thing is the language barrier and many small countries,” he said.
The company is building a complete localised store by opening an office in Dubai.
“We have developed some apps and hired Arabic people to pick the content from the Arabic world and put it on Mobogenie platform by getting approval from the concerned parties. There are many Arabic apps which are getting unnoticed on the Google Play Store and we list the right apps at the top of the table. Our store gets the highest number of downloads from the Middle East and everything lies in the localisation, he said.
The Middle East’s app market is continuously growing and will continue to do so, with smartphone penetration in the region among the highest in the world — and set to grow an additional 39 per cent on top of the 62 per cent current average by 2015.
He said the main difference between a Google store and Mobogenie is privacy and data-drop protection.
To access the Google store, he said users need a password and email address to log in, but in Mobogenie, no password, username or email address is required.
Also, the data-drop protection is a “very unique patented feature”.
“When one user downloads an app and in between if the internet connection goes off or the user wants to pause it, it starts from where the user left off unlike Google store where the download starts from the beginning. It matters a lot for developing countries due to the high data cost,” he said.
