The exponential growth of smartphone users in India will help the mobile applications market to expand in the country, enterprise mobility solutions firm Xcube Labs said.
“As per current estimates, we’re expected to have close to 400 million smartphones in use in India by 2016. This is an impressive figure and it will eventually lead to development of a more robust mobile app market in the country,” Xcube Labs CEO Bharath Lingam told PTI.
India did not start out being the country with one of the largest base of mobile users; however, it surpassed most of the first world countries in a short span of time once carrier prices as well as the handset prices dropped, he added. “We see a similar opportunity for mobile apps in India”.
The growth of mobile apps in India is driven by the growth of smartphones, availability of bandwidth and of local content and relevance of global apps to this ecosystem,” Lingam said.
India, that has the world’s second largest mobile phone user base, saw dip in feature phone sales for the first time in the July-September quarter as smartphones continue to capture the consumer interest.
According to a report by CyberMedia Research (CMR), mobile handset shipments grew 10.9 per cent to 62.9 million units during July-September 2013. Of the total, 51.8 million units were feature phones, while 11.1 million were smartphones.
On growth of 3G in India, which will help the mobile apps eco-system, Lingam said: “Once smartphones started getting traction in advanced nations, 3G data consumption really took off and we expect a similar projection in the case of India as well. Industry projections measure 3G adoption to be at 250 million by the end of 2016.”
On the back of these trends, Xcube sees a great opportunity for users to initially use popular utility and entertainment apps such as whats app, angry birds etc, and then move to local content and entertainment, he added.
The initial investments on mobile apps in India will be on the large media and entertainment segment and once that gets critical mass, more content from smaller players is expected to come in, he said.
Lingam, however, said the problem with mobile apps is how the firm, which creates the app, will entice the user to use that. Also, app discovery is a big challenge.
“Top 100 apps make for about 80 per cent of revenues on the Apple App Store and this is the problem that faces app developers. Xcube has been constantly working in this space and has come out with some solutions,” he said.
Xcube’s Insta Sense product humanises the mobile app so that it thinks for the user. It also makes the application intuitive, which again helps it to prioritise as per the usage of the smartphone, Lingam added.