Apple's India Strategy: Think Of The Children

The company needs the country’s young developers to help take market share from Google

- Saritha Rai

For his seventh birthday, Ashwat Prasanna’s parents gave him a MacBook. Three years and one Apple boot camp later, his free measurement- converter app, Quickvert, has been downloaded more than 1,000 times on the App Store.

Ashwat, who often skips cartoons to code, is among thousands who’ve passed through the company’s App Accelerator in the Indian tech hub of Bengaluru, formerly known as Bangalore, over the past year. In several sessions over two days, engineers and designers showed him how to write sleeker code for an app that translates units of measurement, such as Celsius temperatures to Fahrenheit and vice versa. “The uncles here taught me to build a better user interface,” says the gap-toothed 10-year-old, using the familiar term to denote respect for his programming elders. By choosing Ashwat’s app as one of a handful of accelerator projects to showcase, Apple Inc. is showing India’s most junior developers it wants to help smooth their way to the App Store.

The accelerator initiative, which Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook announced in a high-profile India visit in 2016, invites select developers every week for tutoring and modules on fast-track app development. In rooms painted Apple’s signature all-white, professionals share the latest technology in sessions ranging from a day to two weeks. Web retailer Flipkart Online Services Pvt. and food delivery platform Zomato Media Pvt. are among those that have sent developers through the program.