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India's paying mobile consumers spend almost as much on IAPs as global average

Smaller, more frequent purchases

India's paying mobile consumers spend almost as much on IAPs as global average

Mobile attribution analytics firm AppsFlyer has found that the average paying mobile app user in India spends only $0.82 less than the global monthly average - despite long-standing barriers to monetisation in the country.

In its State of In-App Spending report, which also found that iOS users spend 2.6 times more than their Android counterparts, nearly 30 million purchases by over 100 million users across more than 1,000 apps were examined between April and May 2016.

Across all apps - not just games - it found that the average paying user globally spends $9.60 per month. In India, the average was only $0.82 less at $8.78.

Closing the gap

It's encouraging to see India, which has previously struggled to unlock paying users thanks to Android's dominance and a lack of credit card penetration, begin to approach parity in this area.

Where it continues to fall behind, however - a wider problem not easily solved by technical solutions, as identified by our Indian Mavens - is in that all-important intent to pay.

Indian iOS users spend 5.5x more and are 3x more likely to spend.

Indeed, with 5.2% of users globally spending money on in-app purchases, only 3.1% of those in India are inclined to do so.

And, with the global average for games specifically sitting at 3.5%, it stands to reason that the Indian average is even lower.

A work in progress

The aforementioned imbalance in willingness to pay across iOS and Android is wider in India, too, with Indian iOS users spending 5.5 times more and being three times more likely to spend than those on Android.

However, with Android enjoying nearly 90% of the smartphone market share in India, paying iOS users don't have the same power to impact the overall market as they do elsewhere.

Furthermore, while the outlay of the average paying user in India over the period of a month is similar to the global average, individual transactions are far smaller - averaging at $1.32 in India and $8.80 worldwide.

This indicates that paying users in India make smaller, but more frequent purchases - perhaps suggesting that Google Play's 2015 introduction of lower, India-specific pricing tiers has worked as intended. 

You can read the full report over on the AppsFlyer website.

[Source: The Hans India]


Features Editor

Matt is really bad at playing games, but hopefully a little better at writing about them. He's Features Editor for PocketGamer.biz, and has also written for lesser publications such as IGN, VICE, and Paste Magazine.