India's App Economy Contributes To Growth

Prabir Dey’s day starts in the morning and often ends at mid-night.

- Tushar K. Mahanti

He can’t afford leisure but he values his job as a courier boy for a food delivery start-up. He is one among millions of young Indians who, armed with their smart-phones and motor cycles, deliver nearly anything and everything to online customers. India's app-based economy is expanding rapidly.

A surge in the popularity of apps to procure a whole lot of things – from food, transport, retail goods to services including insurance, health and medicines – provides a welcome avenue of employment for many as India's unemployment rate touches at a record 45-year high.

But first what is an app-based economy? It refers to the range of economic activity surrounding mobile applications. Mobile apps created new fortunes for entrepreneurs and changed the way business is done. The app economy encompasses the businesses transacted through apps, sale of apps themselves, ad revenues or public relations generated by free apps, and the hardware devices on which apps are designed to run. Apps are now affecting a shift for online businesses, from laptop to smartphone customers.

The present digital environment is extremely app-focused roughly 90% of mobile time is spent using apps for meeting everyday needs from booking movie tickets to calling a carpenter. Regardless of the existence of 3.8 million apps on Google Play Store and two million apps on Apple App Store, one wonders what applications people may still miss.