Indian apps see surge of new entrants out to replace banned Chinese peers
Mumbai: The ban on 59 Chinese apps appears to be generating a vigorous response from Indian entrepreneurs — many from smaller towns — keen to fill the void. The Indian Android app ecosystem has witnessed a stream of new entrants after the Chinese apps were banned on June 29 over security concerns in the wake of rising border tensions between the two countries. Young developers from places such as Solapur in Maharashtra and Gir Somnath village in Gujarat have launched Indian alternatives to consumercentric Chinese utility apps.
These apps — such as Kaagaz Scanner, Bharat Scanner, Share India, ShareKaro — focus on categories like file-sharing and management, photo-scanning and phone cache cleaning, among other applications.
Document scanning app Kaagaz Scanner, with over 500,000 downloads so far, has garnered undisclosed funding from accelerators while startups such as Mitron TV, Chingari and Bolo Indya — operating in the short-video segment — have snagged new capital from investors like Nexus Venture Partners and LogX Ventures. File transfer app Share India even claims to have earned a few hundred dollars in ad revenue during this period.
Investors are bullish about the emergence of Indian apps in different sectors, saying there’s a clear need to create consumer-friendly utility apps that are intuitive in user interface and experience. “However, we also want to look at user retention and monetisation potential of these apps before making any investments,” says Madhukar Sinha, cofounder and general partner at IndiaQuotient, a VC firm that invested early on in ShareChat.
This new crop of Indian apps wears its ‘country of origin’ tag on their sleeves, incorporating ‘India’ or ‘Made in India’ in the app’s title or description. Some even have the Indian flag in their logo.
Popular search results on Google Play Store indicate that Indian online users are looking for homegrown alternatives to the banned Chinese apps. Phrases such as “short video app made in India”, “file transfer Indian app”, “browser app for android Indian”, “file scanner Indian app”, “news aggregator India” show up among the top five popular searches in these categories.
In many reviews on Play Store, users can be seen encouraging these fledgling Indian apps to improve their features.
“Our Indian roots are the only reason we’ve managed to get over 150,000 installs for our app Bharat Scanner in less than a month of launching on Play Store,” says Prajjwal Sinha, founder of Knickhead Softwares.
Sinha’s document scanning app Bharat Scanner went live on July 5 as an Indian alternative to the wildly popular Chinese app CamScanner.
IS ‘VOCAL FOR LOCAL’ ENOUGH?
These apps are trying to catch up with counterparts that have had years to upgrade their features and acquire new users.
Sinha of Bharat Scanner believes the return of Chinese coun-terparts in the category — if that were to happen — could rain on his parade, even when he claims his app has 80% user retention at the moment. “We can’t compete with CamScanner. It’s a huge company. The only reason we launched was because of the ban,” he says.
However, short-video-sharing platform Mitron’s cofounder Shivank Agarwal feels “there are always going to be global as well as local players in the market. This is a huge space and there is a tremendous opportunity for each of us”. Assuming user retention is a given, the tech and monetisation capabilities of an app will likely declare the winner among utility apps, says Sinha of IndiaQuotient.
Players in all the categories, which the banned apps occupied, are likely to slug it out with homegrown apps now. It is possible the homegrown apps may have their own security issues. “Nobody has checked these fledgling homegrown apps for security concerns either. Most of them are using open-source codes to emulate the Chinese apps,” notes Dhruv Bhutani, editor of Android Authority, an Android-focused online news publication.
As someone who follows the Android app ecosystem closely, Bhutani struggles to be bullish about this new wave of “copycat apps” that have come up on Play Store. “Indian app ecosystem wasn’t creating chart-topping apps before this. It will be tough to change that now as well,” he says.