India Ahead of US in Downloading Apps From Google Play Store

With the the internet reach shooting up, more users in India are now downloading apps for fun.

It is estimated that the market will be worth over $1 billion by 2020. (Photo: iStock)

Over 6 billion apps from Google Play Store were downloaded from India in 2016. This damning fact means that India tops the chart of countries with the most downloads, even surpassing the US.

The growth from 3.5 billion downloads in 2015 tells you how quickly India is moving as a mobile user destination. But there’s to know about the pattern in which Indian users are making the best of these apps.

All this data has been sourced through the App Annie fourth annual Retrospective Report released this week, which also tells us that most users have around 30 apps on their mobile which they use every month.

Now let’s take a look at the most popular apps being used by Indian users.

There are no surprises to see Facebook and WhatsApp to be among the top two preferred apps. After all, they’ve got over 360 million combined users from India on their platform. However, seeing UC Browser here came as a big surprise to us, especially when you haven’t heard much about them with respect to users in the country.

In terms of gaming, these were the apps that India loved and downloaded the most.

Favourite Game Apps

• Candy Crush
• Subway Surfers
• Temple Run 2
  

It was also interesting to see that India still has a long way to go before it prominently features in the list of countries where users pay for the apps.

China became the largest market in terms of iOS app store revenue

The rise in consumption of videos on mobile in India over this period can be hugely attributed to free internet services from Reliance Jio 4G. There’s no coincidence in the fact that internet usage shot up during the period when Jio was available to the public.

And with internet prices coming down further in 2017, the numbers can surpass those of the past with ease. We also expect Amazon Prime to feature among this list. Also it is to be seen whether users will consume internet with the excitement once they start paying for the data.