I was supposed to speak at the CSI event in Ahmedabad earlier this month. Due to a freak delay in flight departure from Bangalore, I did not reach Ahmedabad at all – went till Mumbai & came back. 
Nevertheless, here is the speech I had prepared for that: [Personal intro, Intro to Vodafone Dev Program go here] Let us now move into the topic “Mobile Applications for India – Are we living up to the potential”. First, a quick take on how mobile apps are faring in India right now. There are scores of application stores, with stores of handset vendors like Nokia, Samsung, stores of platforms like Android, iOS, Windows Phone, stores of mobile operators like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Aircel and also some independent stores like Getjar, Opera etc. There are also niche attempts by Indian start-ups like Onward Mobility, AppBazar etc that have seen some mind share from developers. There have been several Indian applications: NewsHunt, TukTuk Meter, TaazzaGo, Zomato, CardsCreator, Sparsh etc. Apart from the app companies, there have been other successful companies around mobile ecosystem: mChek in payments, InMobi on mobile advertising, Infosys has its own platform called Flypp offered as a white labelled app store. On the downloads front, we have great statistics from everyone. Airtel claimed 2.5 million downloads right in the first month. For Nokia, India is the top download center for Ovi Store, India is an important market for Android and Windows Phone too. Getjars and Operas thrive on the downloads from India. Our own application store at Vodafone, live for the past couple of weeks has seen tremendous numbers. In summary, we are doing wonderful. You don’t want to clap? Everything is hunky dory, right? We are the next super power in the world. Silicon Valley, move on! India has taken over. Is that so? Is this all we can do? Come on!! Without taking away the successes we have had, let us look into this more deeply. First, some numbers: Indian population: 1.21 billion, Mobile Subscribers: 800+ million, Handset distribution: Close to 10% smartphones, 70% Java enabled phones. More than 100 million data users. Forget the accuracy of these numbers. They are huge, aren’t they? Now, is everyone using an ‘App’? Barring a handful, how many pure Indian Apps are there? A slightly deeper look into this question will show why we are nowhere near our potential. To understand the potential, let us now think about what an app itself is. What is an app? Angry Birds, right? Like the joke goes, our smartphones now have the same computing power that NASA’s super computers had in the 1960s. However, NASA put a man on the moon and we put birds on pigs. Jokes apart, if you look at it, an app is an “encapsulation of an experience”. It could be reading, listening, transacting, playing etc. You get the point? Newshunt is an encapsulation of the experience of news reading – on a mobile phone, Mundu Radio is an encapsulation of the experience of listening to FM Radio – on a mobile phone, NGPay is an encapsulation of the experience of booking railway ticket – on a mobile phone, Angry Birds is the encapsulation of the experience of playing slingshot – on a mobile phone. So, who are the competitors to mobile apps now? It is the thing that the consumer now uses – For NewsHunt, it is the newspaper, for NGPay, it is the IRCTC website or the counter at railway stations and so on. Do you follow me? Now, have we reached a stage where every possible encapsulation of experiences into a mobile phone has happened for the Indian consumer? The simple answer is, NO! With so much of potential in this space, let us look at some of the issues in creating mobile apps for India. Not enough local content is available . For example, if you want to build an app to track the traffic pattern in Ahmedabad, there is no ready data / APIs available for one to use. If one wishes to create a mandi price app for rural India, the area is so fragmented that unless one starts building a network of agents, it is impossible to do. And so on. There is minimal Indian language support in the handsets . Of course, there are phones with Indian language support, both display & input. But frankly, doesn’t the user experience on all of them suck? Which is why we have Panini & Sparsh keypads out in the market, right? Don’t get me wrong, I know Nokias & Samsungs are doing their best but it is still not good enough. Data penetration is low. Of course, the operators are trying their best and there is growth but the penetration is still low. It is actually a chicken and egg story. Data penetration will increase only with killer apps and killer apps would come only with data penetration. Device/Platform fragmentation has been a huge issue . There are more than 90 handset brands. Even among the feature phones, there are so many versions of Java running on them that it is close to impossible to build a Java app that would run on all of them. Next is monetization . With very low credit card penetration in the country, most people are dependent on the operators for billing. And they behave pricey. We operators have started changing now but it is going to be a while before significant changes come in. Finally, to marketing and distribution . It is one thing to be on all stores but effectively, unless you break into the top league, you are not going to see significant downloads. And you need deep pockets for other kinds of advertising.! So there are several issues like these. And we can keep whining about them. But that is not going to help anyone! As Woody Allen said, ” The only person standing between me and greatness is – ME .” It is like saying, if only I were born in the Silicon Valley, I would have been Steve Jobs . You might remember a dialogue from the movie Social Network: Zuckerburg says to the Winklewoss twins: If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook . Likewise, if I were Steve Jobs, I would have been Steve Jobs . Not whining about stuff. Don’t get me wrong. This is not to demean anyone, just a fact of life. Issues would exist but we just need to find ways to overcome them. I know it is easy to preach but then that is what I am here for! What I want to talk to you next about is the kind of opportunities that exist in this space with all those issues? First of all, you need to decide – What business are you in? Building an App? Building a bunch of apps in a category (say games)? Build apps for someone else – that is pure services? Or into one of the associated business that come with apps stores. I will now list down some areas that I have noticed beyond just building apps for oneself or for others. Some of them could interest you! Application Stores, for distributing others apps – Well, this is a big boys’ game right now but there are indeed attempts by companies like Onward Mobility to build their own apps stores. Analytics on apps stores – So many developers do not have internal analytics for their apps. Why don’t you build one? There are companies like Distimo/Flurry in this space but no one in India. Apart from analytics to developers, you can also sell research reports based on analytics to apps store providers. I can tell you that I desperately need it to get to know about Indian apps but there is no clear report available right now – I can be your first customer. Recommendations – With apps stores getting crowded, discovery of apps is huge pain point for users and in turn even developers. Can you build a neat, personalized recommendation mechanism specifically for Indian users? Cross Platform tools – Right now, developers are struggling to get their apps built & tested for multiple platforms/models. Can you build a service that makes it easy? There are so many HTML5 based cross platform tools out there – but one for India, supporting all Indian languages & that comes with a Siri like service for Gujrati would be wonderful. DIY tools for app creation – In the late 90s, every brand, big & small, wanted a ‘web presence’. Likewise, very soon, every brand would want an ‘app presence’. Imagine your dentist having an app, your favorite restaurant having one, your hairstylist having one and so on. Would you not be thrilled? But can these guys now afford the insane amounts charged for mobile app development by the services companies? No. But what if they have a do it yourself tool to create one for their needs? There have been attempts by Google, Nokia & some third parties towards this but none as close to having your favorite sweets ordered from the “Bikanerwala app” on your phone. There is a huge scope here. Enterprise Mobility – This is an area of huge growth and the speaker after me is going to explain it better. I would like to urge you to not think of Enterprise mobility as something for large enterprises alone. In the consumer segment, to a lot of Indians, their first experience of internet is through a mobile. Similarly, to a lot of small enterprises in India, their first experience of an ERP is going to be through a mobile. Remember, I have not even mentioned the scope in the areas of building a business with an app as its basic interface here. That is an ocean. Just get out of this building (once my talk is over) and see for yourself the amount of opportunities that exist. Encapsulate every experience of an Indian into an app. Let Apple’s statement of ‘There is an App for that’ be true to every experience of an Indian. Well, you know what; this list is bound to be incomplete, even wrong in some areas. That is because; we have only scratched the surface here. And these come from me – an armchair critic, if you will, sitting in a large organization & preaching to others. If you get on the field and attempt to come out with solutions, there will be 1000s of problems that are waiting to be solved. By you, right now, right outside this campus!! Finally, a quote from Steve Jobs! It is customary to mention Steve Jobs in such presentations and have his quote. I do not want to be left out. Jokes apart, he says ” When you start looking at a problem, it seems really simple—because you don’t understand its complexity. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work. Then you get into the problem and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going and find the key underlying principle of the problem and sort of come full circle with a beautiful, elegant solution that works .” In terms of mobile apps for India, I think we are in the stage where our solutions are still oversimplified ones. Soon, we will realize that they do not work. And then come up with convoluted solutions. And then some of us will keep going and find the underlying problem and come up with an elegant solution. I would like to believe we have one of them in our audience today! Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It was a pleasure speaking here!
