Flipkart becomes first Indian app to reach 50 million mark on Play Store, Hike messenger follows to become second

Flipkart has become first Indian app on Google Play Store to hit 50 million install mark. The company claims to have achieved the milestone in first week of February. Company claims that Flipkart app on Android Play Store is highest rated Indian application across categories including communication, social, entertainment which also seems true going by data present on Play Store. At the time of writing this post, Flipkart had over 1,742,340 reviews out of which 961,928 users gave it a 5 star rating, overall rating of the application at this moment is 4.2 which is indeed an achievement keeping in view the number of downloads and reviews of the application.

Another Indian application Hike messenger has also reached the 50 million installation milestone on Google Play Store and has an average rating of 4.3, however the company confirmed that it hit the magical numbers on February 14 making Flipkart's claim legitimate of reaching the milestone first.

This landmark follows the SimilarWeb report that ranked Flipkart as India’s numero uno shopping app with 47% of the share of visits. In the SimilarWeb report, the combined traffic share of Flipkart and Myntra stood at an overwhelming 63%. Amazon was in the third position with 15.86% followed by Snapdeal with 13.84%.

Apart from regular ecomm stuff, Flipkart is also known for its innovative initiatives such as image search, Flipkart Ping which gives the application an edge over its competitors.

The Morgan Stanley report on Ecommerce in India for 2016 has placed Flipkart as the undisputed number one ecommerce company in India with a dominant market share of 45%. According to the report, Flipkart’s market share of 45% is equivalent to the combined market share of the next three players (Snapdeal, Amazon and Paytm). Interestingly, Flipkart is the only e-commerce company to report a gain in market share from the 2015 Morgan Stanley report to the 2016 report. The market share of Snapdeal declined from 32% to 26% while that of Amazon went down from 15%  to 12%. Flipkart’s market share showed an increase from 44% in 2015 to 45% in 2016.

The Indian ecommerce market is overwhelmingly mobile-led with around 70% percent of traffic coming from mobile devices. The 2016 Morgan Stanley report expects internet penetration to double by 2020 and the number of total online shoppers to reach the 320 million mark by the same year.