Google Googles India’s local apps and games to become a powerful digital destination

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Google Googles India’s local apps and games to become a powerful digital destination

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

Aditya Swamy, Director of Play Partnerships at Google, said in a blog post that the apps and games developed in India had a 150 per cent increase in the time spent by users outside India in 2021 compared to 2019 on Google Play.

The search giant says in the past two years, apps across categories such as education, payments, health, entertainment, and gaming have seen stupendous growth. HealthifyMe is a popular health app that helps many across the country with their fitness needs. Doubtnut is making education more accessible as a multilingual learning app because of Pratilipi's enabling high-quality Indian language storytelling. One of the first Indian games to have over 500 million downloads was Ludo King. PlaySimple Games is a great example of a local gaming studio thriving in global markets.

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

Google will continue to build a local and helpful Play for India, even after it has reaffirmed its commitment.

As we complete a decade, we reaffirm our commitment to India's thriving app and developer ecosystem. Local developers' innovations and our commitment to helping build the local app ecosystem will help India turn a new page in its journey to become a powerful digital economy, says Swamy.

He believes that Google will continue to invest in initiatives that enable a variety of developers to build useful apps and successful businesses on Play. We hope 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 useful and scalable apps, says Swamy.

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