Aawaz.com makes debut on Indian mobile operating system Indus’ app store

Audio-on-demand platform Aawaz.com has partnered Indus OS (formerly Firstouch), an India-based mobile operating system for first-time internet users in the country, to make its Hindi content app available on the latter’s app store AppBazaar.

Launched by Agrahyah Technologies in January 2019, Aawaz.com streams original audio and offers long-form text content in Hindi. It is available as an app for Android smartphones and on the web.

The company said its partnership with Indus OS will make Aawaz.com accessible to a vast segment of smartphone users who prefer a native Indian language to English.

“Our focus at Indus OS is to build system apps to simplify the discovery and consumption of digital content and commerce in the user’s preferred language, thus ensuring a truly inclusive digital growth and an enriched user experience for everyone,” said Rakesh Deshmukh, co-founder and chief executive, Indus OS.

Indus OS is available in English and 23 Indian languages, spoken by over 95% of the country’s population. Its app store provides apps and content in English and 12 regional languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Malayalam, and Bengali.

“English dominates 51% of the content on the web, while Hindi stands at a negligible 0.5%. For a country that has over 500 million Hindi-speaking persons, that’s an abysmally low quantum of content, let alone other 21 official languages of India,” said Sreeraman Thiagarajan, co-founder of Agrahyah.

Agragyah further said that the new app on the Indus OS app store will offer multi-genre audio shows and podcasts.