Leading payment payments app, Paytm, has been removed from the Google Play Store. Users have been reporting this issue since the morning of Friday, 18th September 2020.
Google India and Paytm are yet to comment on the situation.
A quick search on Google Play Store comes with up all the other apps from One97 Communications, including the Business, Money, and their e-commerce app — Mall. But the main payments app, Paytm, is missing from the results.
Paytm Removed from Google Play Store
It’s too early to comment whether it’s due to Alibaba’s stake in the company, amid the ongoing India-China situation, or it may even be an internal error altogether. We’ll update the article as soon as we have more information on this.
Usually, the app is available on Google Play Store via this link. Opening this link reveals “We’re sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server.”
Developing…
Update
Google India has told TechCrunch, that Google India prohibits online casinos and other unregulated gambling apps that facilitate sports-related betting in India. Paytm, has been notified of this policy violation multiple times and yet has not complied with the norms. This might be the major reason of pulling the app from Play Store.
Sports betting is banned in India, as per the rules of central government. Apps like Dream11, MyPlaying11 are allowed since in those apps, user selects their favourite players and win if their selected players perform well.
Google has also notified Disney+ Hotstar to display a warning before running ads for fantasy sports apps.
Update #2
The app is now back on Play Store. You can download it using this link.
Also Read: Google Pay Will Bring NFC-Powered Payments to India soon