WhatsApp appears to be the most popular app among smartphone users in India, according to a report by ComScore, titled ‘Global Digital Future in Focus.’ Incidentally, Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, doesn’t figure in the list of the top five apps in use in India.
Google Play, Youtube, Gmail and Google Search are the other four most-often used apps in India among the 300 million smartphone users in India (as of end 2017). WhatsApp has a user base of 200 million in India.
Also, in India, smartphone usage accounts for 89 percent of total digital minutes spent in a day (the total time spent using internet access gadgets), while the rest is spent on a desktop or laptop. That’s even higher than the US and Canada, where time is almost equally divided between tablets and phones, and to a smaller extent on PCs.
Another interesting stat in the ComScore report is the growth of Amazon sites (Prime music, video, Alexa and shopping). In India, Amazon saw much faster growth compared to Facebook and Google.
Among the four social media giants globally, in India most time spent online is on Facebook, followed by Instagram and surprisingly a small percentage of Snapchat. Twitter is a minority here.
When it comes to messenger apps, between Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and We Chat, Indians use Whatsapp the most, according to ComScore. In the US, it’s the opposite, with Facebook Messenger being used the most.
The ComScore report uses multi-platform data from 11 countries USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia and Malaysia.
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