Google Play to increase investments in India to foster innovation

New Delhi: As it celebrated its tenth anniversary on Thursday, Google Play announced that the business would keep spending money in India to address local possibilities and concerns.

In comparison to 2019, the number of active monthly users of Indian applications and games increased by 200%, while consumer spending increased by 80%.

Aditya Swamy, Director, Play Partnerships, said that local developers are finding global audiences with Indian apps and games, seeing a 150 per cent increase in time spent by users outside India in 2021 compared to 2019 on Google Play.

"We will continue to invest in initiatives that enable a diverse range of developers to build helpful apps and successful businesses on Play," Swamy said in a blog post.

"We want to help every developer with an idea capitalise on the potential to reach 2.5 billion monthly active users and 190 countries with Google Play," he added.

India is uniquely positioned to become a leading hub for global app innovation and there is tremendous potential for homegrown startups across the country - regardless of size and geography -- to thrive in the global app ecosystem.

"We will continue to evolve our tools to support developers' business decision making and evolve our business models to help them grow their businesses," Swamy mentioned.

More than 2 million developers work with Google Play to build businesses and reach people across the globe.

"We are excited by what Play's developer and user communities in India will experience and build in the next 10 years," said Swamy.

The company said that in the past two years, it has seen apps across categories such as education, payments, health, entertainment, and gaming witness stupendous growth.

"There has been great momentum in gaming too. Ludo King became one of the first Indian games to cross 500 million downloads," said Google Play.