Flipkart has become the first Indian app in the Google Play Store to cross the 50 million downloads landmark. It had apparently achieved this figure in the first week of February.
According to a statement, Flipkart is the also the highest rated Indian shopping app on Google Play with nearly 1.7 million people fixing an average score of 4.2 to the app. A SimilarWeb research report asserts that the application dominates 47% of the total number of traffic among e-commerce retailers in the country.
Flipkart and Myntra together account for 63% of hits. The two are followed by Amazon at 15.86% and finally Snapdeal at 13.84%. Online outlets have recently begun aggressively focusing on developing its app platform. The smartphone sector has been growing at a rapid pace here as affordable options give way to more people adopting handsets for the first time.
A report by Counterpoint Research had claimed that India has overtaken the US as the second biggest smartphone market in the world. A sizable number of the population interacts with the web through their phones and apps are an essential way to tap into this potential. Flipkart had tried to test this last year by making Myntra an app-only portal.
Also See: Flipkart Lite launched, because no one wants to download an app for every site they visit
Flipkart later reversed this decision to a certain extent by launching a Myntra mobile site which had functioned as an online catalogue. The brand had previously said that it receives 70% of its traffic via phones with a majority opting to access it via a browser. Furthermore, only 4% of people actually download the app version of a website when asked to do so.
This phenomenon lead to Flipkart introducing a hybrid webapp portal dubbed Flipkart Lite back in November last year. It doesn’t seem to have hurt the company’s app downloads since then, given the tool’s new achievement.