Indian apps are finding a global audience on Google Play

A decade of Google Play, the rebranded Android Marketplace, the platform is being used by more than 2.5 billion people in over 190 countries every month to discover apps, games, and digital content. And India has not just emerged as one of the top downloaders for apps and games across the world but Indian apps are also being downloaded globally.

“The apps and games developed in India were downloaded globally, registering a 150 per cent 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, in the past two years, apps across categories such as education, payments, health, entertainment, and gaming have witnessed stupendous growth. For instance, HealthifyMe has emerged as a popular health app helping many across the country with their fitness needs. Pratilipi has been enabling high-quality Indian language storytelling, Doubtnut is making 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 gaming studio thriving in global markets.

“We have been working with many of these creative minds as part of our growth programs as well. Agritech startup Krishify is scaling up economic opportunities for farmers, Evolveis helping the LGBTQ+ community with mental health offerings, Stamurai is enabling accessible and affordable speech therapy - and there are many more,” says Swamy.

Going forward, Google is reiterating its commitment and will continue to build a local and helpful Play for India.

“As we complete a decade, we’re reaffirming our commitment to India’s thriving app and developer ecosystem. We are confident that local developers' innovations – along with our continued commitment to helping build the local app ecosystem – will help India turn a new page in its journey to becoming a powerful digital economy,” adds Swamy.

He says Google will continue to invest in initiatives that enable a diverse range of developers to build helpful 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 women founders in the country. “We are hoping these programs will empower innovators closest to some of India’s most pressing needs and challenges and help many of them turn their creative ideas into helpful and scalable apps,” says Swamy.

Google also plans to evolve tools to support developers’ business decision making and evolve business models to help developers grow their businesses.