Indian App market to balloon by four times in two years

App makers in India rejoice. According to a study by the The Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) the app market in India is going to mushroom to more than four times its current levels, to US$626.23 million by 2016, with paid apps making up US$344 million of the whole.

This only seems to make sense considering India is going to witness a data revolution very soon, much as it did a 'voice' one a decade or so ago when the cell phone became a ubiquitous device, operated by vegetable vendors and CEOs alike. Already, the country is the hottest market for smartphones in the world with growth rates in excess of two hundred percent and smartphone penetration rates at only around 18 to 20 percent.

Given that there are over 300,000 app developers in the country and that downloading apps seem to be a popular pastime—some 100 million are downloaded every month—this is only going to add to the boom in the add industry.

Of course, there are party poopers to this story could very well be the outfits responsible for facilitating the data surge—telecom companies. Today, they still take the lion's share of an application's (around seventy percent) revenues, leaving a paltry 30 percent to the developer. As this article points out, this contrasts with the healthier revenue share that app stores like Google Play give them.

Telecom operators need to realise that providing better revenue sharing deals to developers ultimately boosts data usage and results in a supply of better quality apps to the market, thus helping the entire mutually dependent eco system.