A decade of Google Play, the rebranded Android Marketplace, the platform is used by more than 2.5 billion people in more than 190 countries every month to discover apps, games and digital content. And India has not only become one of the top app and game downloader across the world but Indian apps are also downloaded worldwide.
“Apps and games developed in India were downloaded globally, seeing a 150% increase in time spent by users outside India in 2021 compared to 2019 on Google Play,” says Aditya Swamy, Director Play partnerships at Google in a blog post.
The search giant says that over the past two years, apps in categories like education, payments, healthcare, entertainment and gaming have grown by leaps and bounds. For example, HealthifyMe has become a popular health app that helps many people across the country with their fitness needs. Pratilipi enabled high quality Indian language storytelling, Doubtnut makes education more accessible as a multilingual learning app. In gaming, Ludo King became one of the first Indian games to cross 500 million downloads. PlaySimple Games is another great example of a local game studio thriving in global markets.
“We have also worked with many of these creative minds as part of our growth programs. Agritech startup Krishify increases economic opportunity for farmers, Evolve helps the LGBTQ+ community with mental health offerings, Stamurai enables accessible and affordable speech therapy – and there are many more,” says Swamy.
Going forward, Google reiterates its commitment and will continue to create a local and useful Play for India.
“As we complete a decade, we reaffirm our commitment to India’s thriving app and developer ecosystem. We are confident that local developer innovations – along with our continued commitment to help build the local app ecosystem – will help India turn a new page on its journey to becoming a powerful digital economy,” adds Swami.
He says Google will continue to invest in initiatives that allow a wide range of developers to build useful apps and successful businesses on Play. For this, Google had recently announced the Google Startup School India to enable 10,000 startups in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and the Google for Startups Accelerator – India Women Founders to specifically help female founders in the country. “We hope these programs will connect innovators closest to some of India’s most pressing needs and challenges and help many turn their creative ideas into useful and scalable applications,” says Swamy.
Google also plans to evolve tools to support developers’ business decision-making and evolve business models to help developers grow their businesses.
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