Despite Indian technocrats’ global contributions in taking innovations forward, byte by byte, and building a new world, chip by chip, the country provided outsourced support from its backyards in Bengaluru. Hyderabad, Chennai, and other western, northern, and eastern hubs. Within India, most individuals rely on foreign-owned digital platforms, which include operating systems, social media, and mobile apps such as WhatsApp, Google Maps, and Amazon.
In recent times, the country’s policy-makers, who are worried about the sensitive users’ data going overseas, and billions of dollars in digital revenues that flows out, have spurred into action, and decided to encourage Indian firms to build alternatives. Souring, yet reviving, relations with China, and ongoing burden of American tariffs, turned the ruling regime to reiterate the Swadeshi mantra. In the recent past, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has evoked it several times.
Modi invoked the idea and concept of AtmaNirbhar Bharat (Self-Reliant India) in 2020, after the global pandemic disrupted and destroyed global supply chains. He wanted Indian businesses and citizens to focus primarily on local manufacturing, and supply chains to reduce the dependence on imports. Today, the same imagination has acquired a distinctly digital dimension. Digital India has expanded to Digitally Self-Reliant India, which has the expertise and temerity to export digital hardware and systems to the world.
Thus, the focus of India’s software and IT sector, which generates almost $300 billion in annual revenues, has shifted towards the creation of indigenous apps, and supporting digital infrastructure. From messaging to navigation, cab-hailing to food delivery, maps to travel, Indian developers, many of whom are backed by government departments and policy frameworks, are building platforms designed to serve local needs. Even better, they harbour the ambitions to blunt the dominance of America’s Silicon Valley (California), and China’s Zhongguancun district (which is a major hub for technology and innovation, and dubbed China’s Silicon Valley).
For example, the National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) development of BHIM UPI and RuPay were transformative, and reduced reliance on Visa and Mastercard. They enabled financial inclusion too. The question is whether India can transform this momentum into global leadership in the app economy. Unlike TikTok or Uber, Indian apps are yet to become household names globally. Even a powerful America seems scared of TikTok.
But the urge is there. Commerce and industry minister, Piyush Goyal, loudly claimed at the Startup Mahakumbh (2025), “India must not be content with being the world’s delivery boys and girls. We must lead in deep-tech, AI (Artificial Intelligence), and global platforms.” According to the B2B media and information platform, Business of Apps, the Indian app market generated $3.3 billion in revenues in 2023, up from $2.7 billion in the previous year.
Policy forum and a think-tank, Broadband India Forum, projects that the app economy could be worth 12 per cent of India’s GDP by 2030, if the current growth rate continues. With the GDP projected to cross $7 trillion by then, this implies an app economy of $ 800-850 billion within a few years. A recent study by Apple concluded that its Indian App Store ecosystem facilitated nearly `45,000 crore (more than $ 5 billion) in developer billings and sales in 2024.
Over the past five years, according to the Apple study, the global earnings of India-based developers tripled. Nearly 80 per cent of the India-based developers’ App Store earnings came from users outside of the country, and 87 per cent of developers were active on multiple storefronts. This implies that the reach of the Indian digital and app arm has crossed the borders, and entered foreign markets. The next step is to force foreigners to depend on Indian apps.
Indian ‘Software as a Service (SaaS)’ giants like Zoho and Freshworks earn majority of their revenues from the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions. Zoho has over 100 million global users, according to media reports. Zoho’s suite, which includes Writer, Sheet, Show, and Mail, provides Indian alternatives to Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. In 2023, India became the fourth-largest exporter of digitally-delivered services, with exports of more than $250 billion, and behind the US, the UK, and Ireland.
Meanwhile, India has gone abroad with digital infrastructure. It introduced its Unified Payment Interface (UPI) services in several nations such as Bhutan, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the UAE. The list includes large and powerful economies like France and Singapore. India is eyeing other markets, which was clear from the agenda of the G-20, which met in New Delhi a few years ago. While these are early days, this infrastructure push represents a new export stream for the Indian fintech sector.
According to Franziska Ohnsorge, World Bank’s chief economist, India’s computer services sector is booming, and ChatGPT and AI have aided this frenetic growth. Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, exports zoomed by 30 per cent. In April-June 2025, exports of software services were more than $47 billion, or 13 per cent higher than the same quarter in the previous year. In 2022, i.e., before ChatGPT, the quarterly figure was just over $36 billion. Ohnsorge feels that India is “well-placed” to benefit from AI, which is being adopted by the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) segment.
However, despite the recent successes and growth, the real test for India’s Swadeshi apps and digital sector will be determined by how they stack up against the world’s two digital superpowers, America and China. The US, of course, is the birthplace of most global consumer apps such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Netflix, and Amazon. They dominate the world because of the first-mover and early-mover advantages, deep-pocketed venture capitalists, and seamless integration with the western markets.
China’s app ecosystem, which is led by Tencent (WeChat), Alibaba, and ByteDance (TikTok), is unparalleled in scale. Chinese apps are deeply integrated into daily life, and combine payments with messaging, shopping, and entertainment into “super apps.” They receive substantial state support, which includes billions in R&D subsidies, as China prepares itself to scurry ahead of America in deep-tech sectors such as AI, chips, semiconductors, and electric vehicles (and batteries). The global tussle over the next 1-2 decades will be on the adoption of digital and technology protocols.
In this respect, India is behind the curve. Unlike the manufacturing bus, which it missed in the 1970s and 1980s, the country is on board a digital one. But there are several, more powerful, and speeding ones ahead of it. It needs to launch a cracker consumer app, something that has the reach of TikTok or Instagram. The efforts are on, and the dream is there. The ambition can be nurtured, user by user.
(The writer is a senior journalist with over three decades experience across print ,TV and digital media)
