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 consumer-centric 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.
Parading Indian Roots
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 Noida-based B2B software company Kickhead Softwares. Sinha’s document scanning app Bharat Scanner went live on July 5 as an Indian alternative to the wildly popular Chinese app CamScanner.
Software developer Kundan Singh tweaked his app Paper Scanner to incorporate a few Indian elements, like a flag in the logo. “I launched the app on June 18 in anticipation of a ban on Chinese app CamScanner that I regularly used and admired for its interface,” says the 28-year-old from Mumbai. For the first couple of weeks, his app fetched an average of 10-12 downloads daily. “Then my boss at work suggested I market the app as an Indian one,” says Singh who works at a consumer internet company by day and treats Paper Scanner as his passion project. “After rebranding, the app has been getting 4,000 downloads and 30 reviews a day on average,” he adds.
On July 6, developers at a Jaipur-based tech firm Innovana Tech Labs launched an app called Indian App Finder on Play Store. “We understood that users would be looking for Indian apps across categories and Google Play Store doesn’t filter apps as per the country of origin,” says Anushri Tayal, project manager at the company. The app so far has a database of 500 Indian software applications. It only has thousand-odd installs at the moment but has ambitions to become a Play Store-like app dedicated to Indian apps.
Most local app developers are confident of their growth prospects as they sense that users want Indian alternatives to popular apps they’ve been using. “I get emails from users asking me to make Paper Scanner a better app than CamScanner. It motivates me to keep at it,” says Singh of Paper Scanner.
Is ‘Vocal for Local’ Enough?
It’s not that simple. These apps are trying to catch up with counterparts that have had years to upgrade their features and acquire new users.
Take the case of Chinese file transfer app ShareIt’s homegrown alternative ShareKaro. Since launching on June 21, the app has garnered over 240,000 downloads, says its co-creator Prajwal Kadam. Kadam took two weeks to add a feature to enable video-file-sharing on the app. “But ShareIt has had five-six years to add and improve on such features. We have to work at 10X that speed, or faster, to meet user demands,” says the 18-year-old science student from Solapur in Maharashtra. Kadam thinks if the ban on the Chinese apps is lifted, it may affect his app’s growth.
Sinha of Bharat Scanner echoes this sentiment 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.
The ban has prompted some developers to create alternatives just because they were regular users of these Chinese apps.
This includes people like Hiren Chhatrodiya, a 22-year-old fisheries science student from Gir Somnath village in Gujarat. Chhatrodiya self-studied the process of app development online just out of curiosity. When he heard that Xender was banned as well, he decided to put all the internet-acquired knowledge to some use and created its alternative in Share India.
The app has over a lakh downloads now. “I ran advertisements on the app for the first 20 days and earned $100 in revenue,” he says. Chhatrodiya believes the return of Chinese counterparts in the category— if that were to happen— could rain on his parade as well.
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. Short-video-sharing platforms will require that in addition to the availability of ample video-consumption data to train the algorithm, says Sinha of IndiaQuotient.
Players in all the categories, which the banned apps occupied, will now slug it out with homegrown apps that have sprung up over the last month or so, says Singh of Paper Scanner.
Meanwhile, Tayal of Innovana thinks Chinese apps won’t have the same market share if they were to come back. “Everyone is aware of the security concerns regarding these apps,” she says.
It is possible the home-grown 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.
It is still early days. “You can’t force a movement to develop an ecosystem overnight,” Bhutani concludes.
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