According to foreign media reports, Chinese application developers are aggressively entering the Indian market. According to relevant statistics, 44% of the top Android apps in India are now from Chinese developers.
Under the leadership of Chinese smartphone manufacturers such as Xiaomi and OPPO, the content behind the Indian touch screen is increasingly coming from China.
According to a report by the Indian technology news site FactorDaily, 44 of the top 100 Android apps in India were developed by Chinese companies, compared to 18 in a year. (The focus of attention is on Android, because among the 500 million Internet users in India, Android is the overwhelming operating system.)
The top Chinese applications include well-known brands such as TikTok (foreign version of the local vibrato) launched by the world’s most highly valued startups, India’s local language news application Helo, Alibaba’s UCBrowser browser, and some Less well-known brands, such as NewsApp NewsDog and streaming application developer Bigo.
The report quotes Sensor Tower’s data as saying that among the top 10 Android apps in India, there are five apps from China; relatively, at the end of 2017, there were only two apps in India’s top ten Android apps. The program is from China.
Comparison of top ten applications in December 2017 and December 2018
For those who have been paying attention to Indian technology in recent years, “China’s application intrusion” is not surprising, although the speed of its invasion is unexpected.
In recent years, China’s two largest companies, Alibaba and Tencent, have invested heavily in promising Indian start-ups. This laid the foundation for other companies seeking development to follow suit and enter the Indian market.
In 2015, Alibaba acquired SnapDeal and Paytm startups through hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. Since then, the pace of investment by Chinese companies has been accelerating.
In 2017, Tencent invested in Gaana (music streaming service) and SWYGY (food distribution service), and invested in Byju (online education service) and Ola (car service) in the previous year. Last year, the two companies also launched local cloud computing services in India.
In addition to the two companies, Xiaomi is also selling mobile phones to local companies and developing local services for them.
For those application developers who have succeeded in India, localization seems to be the key. Companies such as Byte Beat have developed local teams and have developed native applications for India.
As India’s next few hundreds of millions of Internet users will come from rural India, dialects, local content and voice-enabled technologies are the areas that Chinese application developers need to focus on.