Google pushes for quality training of Android app developers

Partners with US-based online education platform Udacity and Tata Trust to offer certified programme

With India having the largest community of app developers outside the US, Google and Tata Trust are pushing for massive training of developers to build apps on the Android platform. The two companies have tied up with US-based Udacity, an online education platform, to certify them through online courses.

The programme, Android Nanodegree, will help developers learn new skills to advance their careers through an online course. In addition, Google and Tata Trust will offer 500 scholarships each to candidates through the programme.

With about three million software developers currently, India is set to become the largest base for developers by 2018. On the other hand, not even a single app from India is among the top 100 apps in Google PlayStore due to quality concerns.

“With the launch of this programme, we want to bridge the gap by providing India’s developer community an easy access to learn and build high quality apps for the world. Today, only two per cent of apps built in India feature in the top 1,000 apps globally and our goal is to raise this to 10 per cent in the next three years,” said Rajan Anandan, vice-president and managing director, Google South East Asia and India.

Every year, nearly 1.5 million youngsters graduate as engineers in India. “The thumb rule is we have five per cent engineers who can be trained to become developers, of which about a fourth become app developers,” said Ramanan Ramakrishnan, an app developer and founder & advisor of Innoventes, a Bengaluru-based product development services company. Human resource experts say in the past year, the demand for app developers has risen about 30 per cent. According to online hiring platform Hiree, about half the searches on its platform pertain to app development.

“With a rise in the number of smartphone users in India since 2011, the need for various apps to cater to them has also increased. Compared to 2014, the demand has risen about 30 per cent. The demand is more than that can be handled,” said Preetam Salian, chief executive at HiringMonk, a recruitment agency for start-ups.

Android Nanodegree takes six to nine months and costs Rs 9,800 per month with Udacity refunding 50 per cent of the tuition fees upon completion. Google will also host a career summit for 30 of the top graduates from the Android Nanodegree programme in Bengaluru by the end of this year.

The huge local language base in India is a challenge for online educators such as Udacity. However, Google’s partnership will help Udacity address this problem effectively. “We are working on translations and captions for videos on YouTube. We have been already providing it in 12 languages across the world, but are yet to start working on Indian languages,” said Peter Lubbers, senior programme manager, developer relations at Google.

Udacity is a four-year old mobile online open course focused on technology education. It was founded by former Googler Sebastian Thrun, who had headed the Google X programme. Udacity has trained about 25,000 users worldwide and currently has about 10,000 active users. The company is witnessing a 32 per cent month-on-month growth in users. With its redefined focus on India, it is looking at a massive growth phase. India is the second largest student traffic source for Udacity. The company witnessed 2x growth in free courses enrolments over the past year.