10 innovative apps making their mark in India and beyond
As Google Play completes 10 years, we’re seeing India evolve from a leading app consumption country to also an emerging app development hub. It’s exciting to see India increasingly becoming the innovation hub of the world, with industry reports indicating that India is expected to become the country with the highest number of developers in the future.
This is exemplified by the diverse range of helpful app categories in India. While sectors such as games and entertainment have always received great interest, utility categories - such as ecommerce, foodtech, and UPI, and transformational categories - such as education, health, and languages services, are growing and have transformed the app landscape.
We’ve had the privilege of working with many of the creative minds behind these apps as part of our growth and accelerator programs. In India, a rewarding moment for us was to see 100 enterprising app-preneurs learn, scale, and thrive as they graduated from Appscale Academy, our growth and development program in partnership with MeitY Startup Hub.
The success and meaningful impact driven by all of these local founders keep us optimistic about the future of India’s app ecosystem. While there are many, here are examples of 10 creative apps from our recent growth program in India that are building diverse solutions across emerging themes on Play - such as mental health, agri-tech, learning - making their mark in India and across the world.
Developer: AyuRythm
Listed on Play: August 2020
Ayurythm aims to serve as a personalised wellness solution, offering lifestyle focused recommendations related to food, exercise, yoga, meditation, and more, focused on the principles of Ayurvedic pulse diagnosis.
Abhilesh Gupta, Co-Founder and Director, Ayurthm: “Ayurveda is a traditional medical system from India that has gained popularity across the world today for its health benefits. Through Ayurythm, we are digitising the benefits of Ayurveda and helping people with customised wellness recommendations based on its principles. Our vision is to make the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda and Nadi Pariksha (pulse analysis) easily accessible to a global audience. Through Google Play, we are helping users across 170+ countries adopt a balanced Ayurvedic lifestyle. We recently re-envisioned our app with the help of Appscale Academy leading to 70% increase in downloads, 33% increase in conversion rate and 25% improvement in ratings.”
Developer: Evolve
Listed on Play: July 2020
Evolve is a health-tech startup focused on the wellbeing of the LGBTQ+ community. The app offers interactive mental health interventions for members of the LGBTQ+ community, covering topics like embracing your sexuality and coming out to loved ones.
Anshul Kamath, Co-Founder, Evolve: “There is a need for more customized solutions for this underserved community. One of the biggest trends we noticed thanks to data from Google Play was the need for mental health in the LGBTQ+ community. We hope to provide a virtual safe space where members can work on themselves and specific challenges that impact their daily mental health. Google Play has played a huge role in our growth story helping us with critical insights, training, and helping us reach users across the world. Every month, we add users from over 100 countries. Learnings from Appscale Academy also helped us reduce our crash rates to under 0.5% and improve our app rating to 4.8.”
Developer: Explurger Private Limited
Listed on Play: August 2020
Explurger is an AI-powered travel social media app for global audiences, from India. Apart from enabling users to share their experiences through pictures and videos, the app aims to cater to the unique needs of travellers through features such as building automatic travelogues, travel bucket lists, and more.
Jitin Bhatia, Founder & CEO, Explurger: “With Explurger, our aim was to build a cutting-edge made-in-India social media platform for travel lovers across the world to connect and explore more! The app uses the thrill of gamification and travelogues to engage and excite users. With our unique features and gamification, we hope to elevate the social media experience for all travellers. We went live during the pandemic and we have more than a million users from more than 50 countries as part of our growing community today, thanks to Google Play. Appscale Academy enabled us to grow many fold in the last 6 months as our user base has grown by 5x, MAU has increased by 10x and engagement has grown by 34x resulting in a new post being shared every 2 seconds on our platform.”
Developer: Hapjoy Technologies
Listed on Play: March, 2018
Gratitude is a self-care journal that interestingly started off as a personal gratitude journal during a difficult period of the founder’s life. Gratitude aims to empower people across the world to focus on the positive by offering simple self-help tools and guided journaling exercises to help them in their transformation journey.
Pritesh Sankhe, Founder, Gratitude:: “I built the Gratitude app out of my need to cope with a tough time and most of our power users have had a similar journey like me where they have overcome their negative emotions by bringing in more gratitude with the app. The app creates a habit of focusing on the positive, becoming more mindful and living with intention by means of simple tools like journaling, self-affirmations and visualisation. Our aim is to make a positive impact in the lives of millions across the world. Tools by Google Play have helped us with insights to cater to our users’ needs, improve our app’s experience, create monetization avenues, and build an engaged global user base. Learnings from the Appscale Academy helped improve our store listing visitors by 100%, acquisitions by 125% and grew our monthly revenue by 50%.”
Developer: iMumz
Listed on Play: April 2019
iMumz caters to expecting and new parents to help them practice wellbeing and mindfulness during the early stages of parenthood. The platform aims to help them adapt a healthy lifestyle by providing actionable activities like meditation, music, yoga, and baby bonding exercises.
Ravi Teja Akondi, CEO, iMumz: “Along with physical health, the mental framework and emotional state of a pregnant woman has a deep impact on the baby's development. Our goal is to inspire families to have a mindful pregnancy and parenting journey, so that they can raise healthier, happier & smarter babies. We are currently catering to 80K expecting and new parents today. We are constantly using data and insights from Google Play to identify what’s working with our users and enrich our product. Appscale Academy enabled us with many best practices and learnings on our app’s UI, UX, and security, and we saw a spike in the daily installs of our app.”
Developer: KidEx Venture Private Limited
Listed on Play: July, 2020
KidEx is an experiential learning platform focused on enabling holistic development of children through a data-driven approach. The platform offers self-learning programs incorporating extracurricular, co-curricular, and life-skill activities, aiming to measure and develop real-life skill levels of the learner.
Amritanshu Kumar, Founder, KidEx: “Holistic development is critical for every child. We are helping parents by introducing children to important life skills such as teamwork, leadership skills, time management, innovation and entrepreneurship. Our product is helping make learning and training more outcome oriented and effective for different profiles of learners, and we want to make this accessible to everyone in the world through Google Play. As an Android-only app, Google Play is playing a critical role in our mission to help every child learn real life skills for professional success. We witnessed exponential growth during the Appscale Academy program with improvements in our store presence, app performance, and reduction in acquisition costs by 50%.”
Developer: Krishify
Listed on Play: March, 2019
Krishify is a social networking and commerce platform for Indian farmers aiming to democratize the flow of information and scale up economic opportunities for farmers. Through the app, farmers can connect with their peers, post queries on farming challenges, seek expert advice, and browse through the digital marketplace to buy agrarian products.
Manish Agrawal, Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Krishify: "Farmers in India encounter many challenges such as information asymmetry, lack of awareness about sustainable farming techniques, limited options and avenues to buy agrarian products, and poor market linkages for crops and dairy products. Krishify is helping democratize free flow of information so that farmers can garner knowledge on best practices associated with farming, become aware of relevant government schemes, and get an avenue where they can connect and transact with businesses, of all sizes and shapes. Our end goal is to help farmers improve their economic prospects. Appscale Academy helped us improve our product and take it to a larger audience base in rural India. We have seen an uptick in user acquisition (over 17%) and user retention based on learnings from the program.”
Developer: Kuku FM
Listed on Play: June 2018
Kuku FM aims to provide high-quality audio content to people in India across diverse genres and vernacular languages.
Lal Chand Bisu, Co-Founder and CEO, Kuku FM: “High-quality vernacular content is the need of the hour, and with Kuku FM, we are aiming to provide meaningful long-form content that’s accessible to everyone in the country in a language of their choice. Today, we create, produce, market, and distribute exclusive audio content across 50+ genres and 8 Indian languages. Google Play has been the bedrock of our app's distribution strategy. The platform has played a big role in our growth journey with insights from Play Console helping us consistently improve our app’s quality and performance. Through Appscale Academy, we got to meet industry leaders and mentors that proved to be incredibly helpful to improve our app’s growth strategy.”
Developer: Sploot
Listed on Play: December 2021
sploot aims to build a community for pet parents to connect with each other and experts, helping them get answers to all their queries in real time. They are building content customised to the needs of Indian pet parents aiming to become the go-to user manual and social media platform for the community.
Garima Kaushal, Co-Founder, Sploot: “We want to make pet parenting fun and stress-free for everyone. We all make the same mistakes while raising a pet and are learning from each other’s experiences. With sploot, we wanted to bring this shared knowledge within the existing community to every pet parent out there. Google Play’s tools have been really useful to understand and run experiments to improve our app’s performance. We recently ran an A/B test and saw sign-up conversion increase by 4x. Appscale Academy helped us a great deal to understand user metrics, tweak our product to suit their needs, and address potential risks in our app through a detailed security report.”
Developer: Stamurai Speech Therapy
Listed on Play: November 2017
Born out of the founders’ struggles with stuttering across their childhood and teens, Stamurai is enabling accessible and affordable speech therapy to people across 155+ countries worldwide, aiming to help people overcome stuttering and lead a better life.
Anshul Agarwal, Co-Founder, Stamurai: “We came up with the idea to codify the help we had been receiving for our stuttering to build an app that could help many others. India has just 4,000 licensed therapists to cater to 60 million people with a speech disorder. With an automated solution like Stamurai, this demand-supply gap is now bridged, with speech therapy available to anyone with a smartphone. Thanks to Google Play, our app is now being used everywhere, from small villages to the biggest cities in the world. Without it, we can’t imagine accomplishing our mission to make speech therapy accessible to everyone. Through our Android app, we are aiming to be the one stop solution for all speech disorders, and eventually, to all special needs.”
