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Reliance Communications (RCom), India’s only telecom operator offering nationwide CDMA and GSM mobile services, has inked a strategic tie-up with GetJar in order to develop the subcontinent’s largest and free mobile Apps Store.

GetJar, the world’s second largest app store will offer RCom its extensive catalog of over 65,000 free mobile applications as per the agreement signed between the two companies. Following the collaboration, over 100 million subscribers to RCom’s telecom services will gain immediate access to GetJar’s massive library of applications via a GetJar apps store through RCom’s VAS platform R-World.

Furthermore, by means of the partnership GetJar will also enable RCom to offer its Apps Store to a large bandwidth of mobile handsets across multiple brands and not remain restricted to a few high-end smartphones. Reliance Communications will offer the GetJar Apps Store across GSM and CDMA networks.

As the world’s largest independent app store, GetJar is the most cost effective, easy and scalable distribution channel RCom will be able to leverage in order to generate traffic to its network. With over 300% growth year-on-year, GetJar averages nearly two million downloads per day globally. In India where mobile phones have become an important part of everyone’s livelihood the country is adding more mobile phone subscribers each month than any other.

“We wanted to partner with the largest, most experienced, “open” application catalog provider to address virtually any device being used by our customers,” said Mr. Anil Pande, Head – VAS, Reliance Communications, “Our partnership with GetJar means that all Reliance Communications customers will instantly have access to thousands of applications ranging from games, shopping and lifestyle applications to sports, entertainment and productivity applications.”

“Our agreement with Reliance Communications allows it to immediately connect its customers with over 65,000 free applications with very little effort,” said Ilja Laurs, founder and CEO of GetJar. “It made a great deal of sense to partner with India’s largest integrated communication service provider as GetJar is also the fourth most visited mobile site in India. We are very excited to offer our catalog of free applications through Reliance Communications’ R-World platform.”

Applications on GetJar range from games, social networking, sports, entertainment and productivity applications. Popular apps such as Facebook� Mobile, Yahoo!, Fandango and eBuddy can be easily downloaded to over 2300 handsets across all major platforms. RCom will offer the service at 50 paise per MB of usage. The application download and use by itself will be free of cost.

The GetJar alliance is part of RCom’s strategy to offer a comprehensive Apps Store service that will include its white-field Apps store RWorld2.0 and GetJar’s third party service offering over 65,000 mobile applications in all.

RCom application store strategy is directly linked to increase in data traffic, increase in data plan adoption and sale of other services through the use of free applications. The enabler of enhanced data usage is possible when a key element is given away for free. The free applications in RCom’s Apps Store strategy will help achieve mass mobile data plan adoption and mobile internet use. This will be the immediate upside to its strategic alliance with GetJar.

“Following the alliance with GetJar, Reliance Communications joins a list of leading global companies using GetJar’s flexible, open app store approach including Sprint, Sony Ericsson, 3UK, The Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Mobile France,” says a Company Release.

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