Metal-oxide semiconductors have attracted considerable attention as next-generation circuitry for displays and energy devices because of their unique transparency and high performance. We propose a simple, novel and inexpensive ‘aqueous route’ for the fabrication of oxide thin-film transistors (TFTs) at low annealing temperatures (that is, <200 °C). These results provide substantial progress toward solution-processed metal-oxide TFTs through naturally formed, unique indium complex and post annealing. The fabricated TFTs exhibited acceptable electrical performance with good large-area uniformity at low temperatures. Additional vacuum annealing facilitated the condensation reaction by effectively removing byproduct water molecules and resulted in the activation of the In₂O₃ TFT at low annealing temperatures, even temperatures as low as 100 °C. In addition, we have demonstrated that the flexible and transparent oxide TFTs on plastic substrates exhibit good resistance to external gate bias stress.