Indians spent 12.84 bn hours on shopping apps in 2023, next only to China

Indian shoppers accounted for 13 per cent of the total hours spent by mobile users across the globe on their shopping apps in 2023, next only to China in this regard.   

According to the “State of Mobile -2024” report released a few days ago by data.ai (previously known as App Annie), which looks into various segments of the app economy across the world, in the last calendar year, users in India collectively spent 12.84 billion hours on shopping apps. This represents an increase of over 73 per cent from the time they spent in 2020 and of more than 3.5 per cent over 2022. 

 

The time spent by shoppers on these apps in 2023 was far higher than in the US (2.8 billion hours), Brazil (3.020 billion hours), but it was less than that in China where it was 49.60 billion hours.

However, the growth in the hours of usage in China has fallen by 0.2 per cent in CY 2023 over the previous year, and it went up by a mere 2.3 per cent in 2022 over 2021. India, on the other hand, grew by 24 per cent over the same period.  

That is not all. There has also been a rise in the share of shopping app downloads whose publishers have their headquarters in India. The share of apps by Indian publishers has gone up from 47.6 per cent in total downloads within the country in 2020 to 54.6 per cent in 2023. However, the peak was in 2021, the pandemic year, when the share was 58 per cent. 

In contrast, the share of Chinese apps in the total downloads in India has fallen from 8.2 per cent in CY 2020 to a mere 1.7 per cent in CY 2023. This has been no doubt due to the government banning many Chinese apps.  During the same period US apps have marginally gained, with their share moving up from 36.5 per cent in CY 2020 to 40.6 per cent in CY 2022, but falling again to 37.7 per cent in 2023.   

The “State of Mobile -2024” report also pointed out that the dating and matrimonial apps economy heated up in India in 2023, with latecomer Bumble seeing the highest consumer spends on their apps. However, Tinder is still at the top of the chart in terms of average monthly active users (MAUs). It has 8.8 million users, although Bumble is closing in with 6.8 million MAUs. The consumer spend on Bumble in 2023 hit $14.5 million compared to Tinder, which is at $7.0 million. 

Amongst matrimonial sites, Shaadi.com is ahead of its rival Jeevansathi.com both in terms of MAUs as well as consumer spends. Consumers spent $700,000 on shaadi.com in 2023 compared to $470,000 spent on Jeevansathi.com, and the former has MAUs of 5.4 million compared to the latter’s 4.9 million. 

In the micro blogging space, while X (formerly Twitter) might have marginally lost its MAUs in India last year (at 118 million), Meta’s Threads has been able to garner a niche market of 12-13 million MAUs, followed by home-grown Koo at around 6-7 million.

On yearly OTT streaming spends in India, Disney+Hotstar continues to be at the top, generating consumer spends of $8.5 million in 2023, followed by SonyLive at $3.2 million and Zee5 at $2.3 million.