BENGALURU: A significant increase in consumer spending on Google Play Store apps in India and a huge increase in downloads has encouraged the internet giant to get Indians to create more apps for the country.

Google has rolled out a `Made for India' app awards programme that seeks to get developers to build apps that are low on memory usage, consumes less data, works in patchy networks, and have content in local languages.These apps will be showcased in a special section in the store.

“Consumer spending on apps has grown 3x in India over the past year . There is a real market here. Monetisation is just beginning in India,“ Google Play's director for business development Purnima Kochikar told TOI at the tech giant's App Excellence Summit here on Tuesday .

She said Google has introduced different payment options like carrier billing, gift cards, and e-wallets for the Indian market based on demands of local app developers. Google declined to provide details about the kind of apps Indians were spending the most on.

India surpassed the US as the world's largest downloader of apps on Google's Play Store in 2016 and has widened the lead over Brazil (now the No. 2 downloader) and the US in 2017. Google said app downloads grew by 150% over the last 12 months in India. Much of this growth came from the games and entertainment category, with video streaming apps like Hotstar and JioPlay leading it. WhatsApp, MyJio, Facebook and its Messenger app, and SHAREit are the top mobile apps in terms of downloads on the Google Play Store.

Only 10% of Indian phones have data speeds higher than 15mbps. However, within the last seven months, the data consumed has gone up from 500MB to 2GB per user for many telephone networks.

