India’s app economy to touch $792 billion by 2030: report

The report prepared jointly by ICRIER senior visiting professor Rekha Jain and IIM Ahmedabad professors Viswanath Pingali and Ankur Sinha is based on the assumption that the app economy will grow at the rate of 2.5 times the GDP growth as of 2030.

The researchers defined app economy as the range of economic activities surrounding mobile applications including the development and sale of apps, in-app purchases, subscriptions, advertisements, public relations generated by free apps and the hardware devices and software on which apps are designed to run.

“Our main conclusion is that by 2030, the amount of money spent on apps is likely to be around $800 billion. Given the Indian economy is expected to be around $6,600 billion, the app spending is likely to be around 12% of the GDP,” Jain said.

According to the data, money spent on the app economy is estimated to be around $145.46 billion in 2023 when GDP at current prices is around $3,820 billion.

The money spent on the app economy is expected to grow to $791.98 billion when GDP is estimated to reach $6,590 billion.

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Jain said the growth in the app economy is around 32%, more than four times the GDP growth because the app economy has a significantly larger multiplier in the form of smartphone users and economic growth. After releasing the report, minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the composition and the nature of the character of the GDP is going to be increasingly digital and technology- led.

“We expect the digital economy to be $1 trillion by 2026. The second most important number is that it is going to take us more places when a digital economy is going to be 20% of global GDP. To put that in perspective, in 2014, the tech and digital economy contributed 4-4.5% to our GDP,” the minister said.

He said the digital economy is now growing faster than the economy.