India is the fastest growing market for apps

India has emerged as one of the fastest growing markets for apps on both the platforms - Apple iOS and Google’s Android Play Store. There has been a sharp rise in the revenue for the first quarter of 2018. The country has also witnessed maximum number of mobile app downloads on iOS and Android according to App Annie, app market data and insights company.

There has been a growing zeal among the India mobile users to download various apps especially video streaming apps that are topping the charts. Among the top ten apps, there are three video streaming apps, which is not the case with China and US where only one video streaming app would be a part of top 10. 

A representative for Appie Annie said, "India is the fastest growing of any market, its Q1y-o-y growth was 41%." At 24%, Indonesia ranked second while Albania was at third spot at 23%.

The App Annie spokesperson further stated, "India was the number one market globally by combined downloads on iOS and Google Play, ahead of the United States (2nd), and China (3rd, iOS only)."

Netflix & Tinder are the most popular apps

Content streaming app Netflix and dating app Tinder are the two most popular applications in India.   Other apps that rank among the top ten include Chinese apps such as UCBrowser, Hypstar and SHAREit. Hypstar has been recently christened as Vigo Video. Three apps from Facebook also feature in the top 10 - messaging app WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and social network Facebook.

What has dramatically contributed to the rapidly changing dynamics of the consumption patter of the users are the increased availability of broadband service and the launch of Reliance Jio. As per the department of telecom, the average usage of data per subscriber has grown 25 times from 62MB per month in 2014 to 1.6GB per month in 2017. 

Although the rate of revenue growth is substantially growing, India is at the 29th position in terms of revenue generation, which is estimated to be $47 million from the sale of mobile apps. US ranked first based on the combined revenue from both iOS and Google Play for the first quarter of 2018. From the sale of apps, US generated revenue of $3.2 billion while Japan came second at $.2.7 billion and China third at $2.4 billion (iOS only).

The experts believe that India can generate absolute revenue after it has witnessed changes in the pattern of mobile downloads. 

"Price of smartphones is coming down and the adoption is very high in India. The sub-Rs10,000 market is really growing in India. So, the number of people using a phone and who are downloading apps are on rise, which grows the base," said Sreedhar Prasad, partner and head consumer markets and internet business, at KPMG India. 

In 2017, India had around 281 million internet users on a daily basis out of which 30% are women as per the report generated by the Internet and Mobile Association of India. The report also said that around 62% internet users are situated in urban areas.

Sreedhar Prasad also said, "People are willing to pay for games and there is slowly a subscription culture coming to India."

Video streaming apps such as AirtelTV, JioTV and Hotstar are extremely popular, there seems to be a lack of popularity where gaming app downloads are concerned, as none of them feature in the top 10 list. This is quite a contrast from China which as two gaming apps - Travel Frog and PUBG Mobile while the US has one app PUBG Mobile among the top 10 as per the data provided by Annie App. 

In the 2017 Retrospective Report, the US data company had placed India behind China in terms of number of downloads. However, India is ahead of the US in the annual retrospective ranking due to the inclusion of third party app store data.

The first quarter of 2018 has witnessed stupendous growth in regard to app economy worldwide, as it has even broken the records of last quarter of 2017 in terms of downloads and consumer spend. 

Shopping apps also witnessed a tremendous year-on-year growth in market share of downloads for Q1 2018. 

On Google Play, consumer spend increased by 25% while iOS witnessed a 20% growth y-o-y for Q1 2018.

(Source: Economic Times &  indiatimes)