Thousands of app developers and only a handful of apps that made a mark. Welcome to India. Which are the ones that made a difference? Are there any commonalities between them? Here’s a list of 10 Indian Apps that have aimed and succeeded to be world class.

1. Friday

It has over 6 million users – 48% from the USA, 7% from India and rest from around the world. The Friday app is a product from Bangalore based startup – Dexetra. The three year old startup also has ‘Iris’ the Android equivalent of Siri to its name.

Friday is like your very own personal assitant on a phone. It keeps track and gives you logs of all phone related activities from any particular day. Apart from this, it also provides answers to queries based on NLP.

The NLP engine can help you retreive information about things you’ve done or pictures you’va taken in the previous week. It literally keeps track of every second you spend on the phone, how much time you have spent in places (using Google maps) and more.

What’s more? Friday lets developers create “applets” or independent apps that use Friday’s semantic map.

Read about developers Dexetra’s journey to be world-class here.

2. Signeasy

Developed by IITian and ex Microsoft employee, Sunil Patro, Signeasy lets consumers sign documents digitally from anywhere in the world. It became the second most downloaded app on the iPad and the 5th most downloaded on the iPhone worldwide last week. Signeasy currently has over 60,000 paying customers.

The product is available on various cloud services like Evernote, Google Drive, AppSense and is available under three pricing strategies – premium, free and pay-as-you-go.

The Signeasy app has crossed the 2 million download mark. Its competitors include Google ventures backed DocuSign and YCombinator backed HelloSign.

3. Game Your Video

For a non-iPhone user, this app will make you wish you owned one. Udupi based developed Global Delight have developed this multiple award winning app.

What about Game Your Video is so awesome? It is a real-time, video recording, editing and sharing app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Take a look at the results:

And it’s free.

4. NightStand HD 2

The app itself is widely known as one of the best alarm clock apps for the iPad. What does it do?

Night Stand HD 2 is a gamified alarm clock for the iPad that also tracks sleeping patterns. Users can set the alarm, and gain points for every time they wake up early and unlock new clock themes. It also features like repeating alarms, customisable snooze, using iPod songs as alarms, tabs on local weather among others.

The one other distinct feature that sets apart the Night Stand HD 2 is the patent pending ‘Aggressive Alarm’ tool. It makes consecutive snoozes after the first snooze shorter, increases volume with each snooze and also makes you to successfully complete a cognitive game in order to be able to activate each snooze.

Developer company Sourcebits was ranked #38 in Lead411’s Tech 500 list of 2010. Sourcebits is based out of San Francisco and was founded by radiologist turned app developer Rohit Singal in 2006. Sourcebits has since executed over 1,000 mobile and cloud projects for enterprise and startups.

5. Deck

You’ve heard of Deck back in 2012, when they won the Qualcomm QPrize 2012 contest. The productivity app allows users to create presentations while on the go.

Founded by IIM B Graduate, Sumanth Raghavendra, the Deck app has more than 300,000 downloads currently. This is not Sumanth’s first venture either. Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail who is one of investors backing Deck, also backed Sumanth’s earlier venture, Instacoll.

Those using the Deck app for presentations don’t need design skills, with the app taking charge of typography, graphics and animation at a single click. It works across screens and automatically scales to fit.

The mobile-first app is available both on the Google Playstore as well as the app store.

6. NewsHunt

This one isn’t truly global yet, but probably beats all the others when it comes to how fast it scaled. NewsHunt is a reading app from India and could be called India’s Flipboard.

It currently provides access to over 100 newspapers in 11 languages. It crossed a billion page views in November 2013, and now also eBooks in over 50 regional languages.

One of the fastest growing reading apps in the country, NewsHunt has crossed over 40 Million installs and has over 1.5 million e-books downloaded via NewsHunt.

7. Shifu

“Shifu is your smart friend who lives in your Smartphone. It observes when and how you use your phone. It knows what important things needs your attention and when is the right time to show them to you.”

Developed by Prashant Jain, Michael Massey and Deepansh Jain, Shifu is one of the most popular productivity apps from India. The to-do and task management app observes your phone usage and reminds you about tasks to be done.

While users definition for tasks before involved specific times, here Shifu automatically alerts you when you do have the time or are at a place to complete a particular task.

It has location based, phone call based, time based and wi-fi based alerts integrated into it. So this for example means that instead of noting down the time/day to buy a tie when you go to the mall, Shifu automatically alerts you to buy one when you go to a mall. It has had over 50k downloads on the appstore so far. Read more about Shifu’s awesome features here.

8. Sari

Developed by Mumbai based CodeConclave app developers, Sari is an iPhone app that has a huge following globally.

The app teaches how to drape sarees with its video tutorials as well as an illustrated, written step by step guide. It also contains other FAQs on how to tie a sari.

On initial release, the app reached the #4 slot on Top Paid Apps in iTunes India. It its latest update, the app also supports Russian and German as part of its in-app localisation.

9. VuClip

They have hit over 120 million monthly users globally and have a unique proposition for its users. VuClip allows users to view, any kind of video on any network, across any device, without glitches.

It has a Dynamic Adaptive Transcoding Technology (DATT) that simultaneously transcodes content across networks by adapting the video stream to the constantly varying bandwidth.

The service is similar to YouTube, but for this. What does the DATT essentially do? It reduces loading time, and cuts out frequent buffering. And nobody wants that.

10. Camera Plus & AirSnap

The Oscars group-selfie went viral, and it’s very likely that everyone has been trying it ever since. The AirSnap feature again from developers GlobalDelight’s Camera Plus app is one for all the crazed group selfie takers then.

The iOS developer’s new feature AirSnap on the Camera Plus app allows users to capture photos and videos by pairing two iOS 7 devices using Bluetooth and Wi-fi. While one of the devices become the remote trigger, the other captures the picture. The app also allows social sharing.

[For app developers/mobile entrepreneurs, we recommend you to attend bigMobilityConf where we are bringing in actionable insights from several entrepreneurs.]

If you think that we have missed out on other names in this list, please suggest in the comments section.