"in 2020, consumers spent over four hours per day using apps"
A new report has revealed that India is the largest market in the world for mobile gaming in terms of downloads.
The report, conducted by the intelligence platform App Annie has revealed that mobile games along with social and entertainment apps such as YouTube, WhatsApp and Facebook were discovered to be the most popular categories for app downloads from iOS and Google Play in the country.
The study stated: “In H1 2021 Indian players installed 4.8 billion games. That’s one for every five globally.”
The most popular free to play title when being measured by both downloads and the number of active users was Ludo King, created by Mumbai-based studio Gametion Technologies.
The report noted: “Although Ludo King is locally developed, it is something of an anomaly.
“In fact, domestic titles barely figure in the India games charts.”
It follows India becoming the second-largest market in the world for app downloads to date in 2021 after China, with 24 billion apps installed, representing a 28% increase from the previous year.
While the homegrown ratio in China is 60%, just 7.6% of the top 1,000 games in India were developed by homegrown publishers, according to the research.
It was also found that in 2020, consumers spent over four hours per day using apps on average for the first time, which added up to a collective 651 billion hours for the year.
Meanwhile, in the third quarter of 2021, they spent almost five hours per day on average with India ranking among the most mobile-first consumers in the world.
Another popular category of apps in India is digital payments.
This follows the increased use of India’s instant real-time payment system, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
As the number of transactions doubled to reach almost eight billion in the first quarter of 2021, the downloads of merchant utility apps also increased by 48% year on year to 124 million.
The study said that the growth of digital and mobile payments on and offline “has created a significant opportunity among developers to create apps for merchants”.
According to the data, Khata Book was one of the top apps in this category with 14 million average smartphone monthly active users in India in the second quarter of 2021.
The report added: “A parallel opportunity created by the UPI-led digitisation of payments has been in ‘buy now pay later’ and credit apps.”
“Products such as StashFin, Dhani, Kissht and Slice Super Card make it possible for consumers to access near-instant credit. Our numbers reveal rapid growth in this market sector.”
In 2020, there were around 24.3 billion downloads and 18.9 billion in 2019 in India.