Friday, 4 August 2023, Bengaluru, India
With regulatory pressure mounting, Xiaomi has quietly removed its music player and streaming software, Mi Music, from the Play Store in India. This is the latest in a string of businesses shut down there.
To offer music streaming to its clients, the China-based phone manufacturer Mi released the Mi Music app in collaboration with the Indian entertainment business Hungama in 2018. According to archived web pages, the app may have received over 1 billion lifetime downloads.
Get unlimited access to curated playlists, content from your favourite artists, and millions of songs. The Play Store description stated, “This is the music app for you to listen to online and offline music.”
The business has discontinued several service offerings in India since last year. In October of last year, Xiaomi closed down its financial services division in the nation, which included the Mi Credit loan application software. The business stopped providing its cloud backup service globally at the same time. Zilli, a short-form video app, was also terminated by the phone manufacturer earlier this year.
In 2020, the Indian government also outlawed several Chinese apps, including TikTok, Shein, and UC Browser, as well as the browser, video call, and community apps from Xiaomi.
Due to a governmental crackdown on tax evasion issues and an executive departure, Xiaomi has experienced difficulties in India. Manu Kumar Jain, a longtime top executive who managed Xiaomi’s expansion in India from the outset, quit last year. The business made layoffs earlier this year to streamline operations and reduce costs.
Xiaomi and partner banks received a notification from India’s Enforcement Directorate in June stating that the phone manufacturer had paid $725 million in unauthorized payments to overseas organizations under the guise of royalties. Since last year, the agency has frozen the company’s bank accounts.
According to analyst reports, all these factors have caused the corporation to drop from the top spot to the third position in the Indian smartphone market.
[Source of Information : Techcrunch.com]
