"The Next Billion" Comes Online

“The next billion” that is coming onto the Internet for the first time is totally different from the first billion that came onboard. Often, they are illiterate, so typing is not an option. So they use voice based commands instead. And communicate more via images and emojis. It is also driving companies to add intuitive icons for all actions.

In India, this category of users is on the rise, thanks to the ridiculously cheap data plan launched by Reliance Jio (which then triggers price wars) and the free Wi-fi made available at many railway stations. It has also resulted in a new kind of apps being developed for this new market, where minimizing data consumption is key, and data speeds aren’t the fastest.

Apart from the usual suspects (Google Search and WhatsApp), here are some of the unheard of apps that have been in the Top 10 downloads in India for the last 30 months:
-         UC Browser: Optimized to use less data for low-speed connections;
-         MX Player: Allows you to store online videos offline for later viewing;
-         SHAREit: To transfer music and movies to friends’ phones offline.
What’s different about these apps? They “have been tailored for slow connections and skimpy data storage”, writes Eric Bellman. The same pattern of users (and apps) is on the rise across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

After all, the market at stake is huge:
“The sheer size of the Indian market means gaining even a small share can bring huge traffic and expansion.”
No wonder then that Facebook (which is also the owner of WhatsApp) has the concept of “2G Tuesdays”, one day a week “when developers can experience a slow connection and how Facebook works on it”! The result? A lighter version of Facebook for emerging markets.

Thanks to the mobile/Internet combo, emerging markets increasingly differ from the richer countries in how money is transferred and payments are made:
“Paytm, the biggest mobile money app in India, now has more than 200 million users in India, vastly more the number of credit-card holders in India.”

The bottomline is that mobile apps have to be rethought for the developing world, and yes, there is a lot of money to be made in the developing world.

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