Virgin Mobile India gets a shiny new app store courtesy of GetJar

GetJar, the largest independent mobile app store, continues to bed down in India. Today the company, which originates from Lithuania, has announced a partnership with Virgin Mobile India to operate a white label app store for the youth-oriented MVNO. This follows a similar ‘strategic partnership’ with Reliance Communications (RCOM), India’s second largest mobile operator, announced back in April.

Virgin Mobile India’s GetJar-powered app store will give its customers access to a catalog of more than 70,000 free mobile games and apps, including popular titles such as Facebook Mobile, Yahoo!, Opera Mini, eBuddy, and Nimbuzz. While Virgin Mobile India will charge users a fee per KB to cover the data costs, with the overall aim, presumably, to drive up data use and feed customers’ growing appetite for apps and content.

As we noted previously, India is adding more mobile phone subscribers each month than any other country, so the market is extremely fertile and represents a massive mobile Internet opportunity (just ask Nokia) and one which GetJar is increasingly positioned to exploit.

On that note, GetJar founder and CEO Ilja Laurs, comments: “It’s a pleasure to partner with a youth focused brand like Virgin Mobile in India. We look forward to garnering a significant mindshare amongst the youth with this alliance.”

To date, GetJar claims an average of nearly 3 million downloads a day globally, and supports all the major mobile platforms (iPhone excluded) including Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Java and Symbian phones. The company, which is backed by $6 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, operates across 200 countries.