India ranked second to China by app downloads globally as downloads increased by 28 per cent to 24 billion in India in 2020, found App Annie, the mobile data analytics platform in its Mobile Market Spotlight Report 2021.
The report highlighted the boom in the app market as India is among the 'most mobile-first markets' globally, with some of the highest daily time spent.
The top downloaded categories were games, social apps, and entertainment apps -- YouTube, WhatsApp Messenger & Facebook were the most downloaded apps. Indians spent a whopping 651 billion hours in mobile apps and games in 2020 on android phones.
Downloads for YouTube and Whatsapp Messenger increased by 33 billion minutes each on android phone devices from 2019.
It further found that an average user had spent 4.6 hours on android phones each day. The time spent by each user grew by 40 per cent from 3.3 hours per day in 2019, driven by surging mobile adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Notably, the daily time spent passed four hours in India for the first time in Q1 2020 with 4.8 average daily hours spent in apps in Q3 2021. The lockdowns induced by COVID-19 led to an 80 per cent increase in average daily hours spent on mobile apps in Q1 2021 compared to Q1 2019.
Gaming's growing popularity among android users
Android gaming retains its popularity in India as one of every five global game downloads came from the country, reaching 4.8 billion game downloads in H1 2021.
"As the largest market for game downloads, this is a major opportunity for homegrown publishers to tailor to the local market," the report said.
Ludo King was the most popular game in India in H1 2021 by downloads, followed by FAU-G and Carrom Pool. The top 1000 downloaded games came from various markets, but only 7.6 per cent were homegrown publishers.
A surge in downloads for finance apps
The boom in investments and interests in the capital markets led to a 65 per cent year-on-year (YoY) growth in hours spent in India's top five investment and trading apps. It is above the global average of 55 per cent.
Average sessions per user in fintech increased five times compared to banking apps in India in 2020. Also, cryptocurrency trading apps like Upstox Pro, WazirX & CoinSwitch saw significant growth in downloads among finance apps in India in Q2 2021.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI), too, was of interest for users whilst as downloads in India saw a 48 per cent increase YoY in Q2 2021 to surpass 124 million, whilst the volume of UPI transactions reached nearly eight billion in Q2 2021 alone, more than 2x the volume in Q2 2020.