The push comes as India seeks greater regulatory control over global tech companies. The initiative would require manufacturers to include the government’s GOV.in app store and related apps like BHIM, DigiLocker, VoterID on smartphones sold from India.
Beyond pre-installation, they also requested that their apps be available for download outside the company’s app stores from third-party sources without triggering “untrusted source” warnings.
The ship hasn’t sailed; the more countries you let do that, the more problematic the precedent becomes. This isn’t a binary thing.
It really should be a binary thing. Company policy should be to ship the same, base OS to every customer in every country, and the only differences would be configuration for things like which radio bands to activate.