The global launch of Google Play in 2012 has already spanned for ten years. Google has stated in a blog post that there are over 2 million developers working on the Play Store, which has more than 2.5 billion users across 190 countries. India has risen to become one of the top countries for app and game downloads over the past ten years, claims Google.
In fact, compared to 2019, there was a 200 percent increase in monthly active Google Play users in 2021. Similarly, according to Google’s blog, consumer spending on Google Play has increased by 80% during the same time frame.
There has been a significant increase in the number of apps in the fields of education, payments, health, entertainment, and gaming. The IT giant cited the multilingual learning tool Doubtnut, the self-publishing and audiobook platform Pratilipi, and the health app HealthifyMe as examples of apps fueling this development.
Ludo King, a recent example of a successful local gaming studio, became the first Indian game to surpass 500 million downloads, while PlaySimpleGames is another. While the LGBTQ+ community is the target audience for Evolve’s mental health services, an agritech startup is assisting farmers with their work. An app called Samurai seeks to offer accessible and reasonably priced speech therapy.
Indian developers are not only finding success in the native market, but they are also reaching consumers around the world. Users outside of India increased their time spent on Indian applications and games by 150% in 2021 compared to 2019.
Google faces a number of challenges in its efforts to mentor and support Indian engineers in creating profitable local market-relevant businesses. Play Academy, the company’s self-learning platform, is one of them. Since its debut in 2018, Play Academy claims to have trained over 80,000 developers in India. In comparison to any other nation, Play Academy has trained the most developers in India.
The business also runs accelerator programmes including its Google for Startups Accelerator and India Games Accelerator. Additionally, the business collaborated with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology startup centre to create the Appscale Academy programme.
Recent graduates of Appscale Academy include over 100 entrepreneurs who have enhanced the user interface, user experience, security, user base, engagement rates, and ratings of their applications. As a result of the training, many of them went on to receive funding proposals from VCs.
