Top Indian digital payment company Paytm has been at odds with Alphabet’s Google Inc for a while now. But the dispute reached a whole new level recently after Google briefly removed Paytm from its Play Store, claiming that the Indian app had violated its gambling-related policies.
Paytm has accused Google of using its dominant Android mobile operating system to promote its own online payment platform, Google Pay. But the Silicon Valley tech giant retaliated saying that its Play Store offers access to a variety of payments services and that Google Pay is not required to come pre-installed on Android devices. India’s most valuable startup with an estimated market cap of $16 billion, Paytm is said to have some 150 million active users in a month. Nonetheless, it going up against tech juggernaut Google remains a David-Goliath kind of story.