The Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), estimates Indian application market to grow from $150 million in 2014 to $626.23 million by 2016.
According to ICRIER, at present India is at the cusp of a data revolution that will be led by mobile. The key factors supporting growth of application market in India include a large mobile subscriber base, a deficit in service delivery through conventional means, a competitive mobile market, presence of a large number of application developers.
At present, the country has 300,000 application developers and witnesses 100 million application downloads every month. ICRIER state that a large number of Indian developers are engaged in developing applications not only for India but for other global telecom markets as well.
Global application stores such as Google?s Play Store pay higher revenue share to the developers as compared to the Indian mobile operators. For the application market to grow further in the country, the telecom industry requires a local application distribution platform which would offer application developers 70 per cent revenue share as against current 30 per cent.
Going forward, telecom operators may also have a greater role to play in driving growth in the application segment by providing competitive revenue sharing to application developers.
