Amazon beats Flipkart as the most-downloaded shopping app in India

BENGALURU: Amazon.in surpassed Flipkart as the most downloaded mobile app on Google and Apple app stores during the first quarter of this year, a milestone for the US company that is seeking to become the No. 1 platform for e-commerce transactions in India.

The data comes from leading app data tracker App Annie, which compared all Indian retail apps. Data for the past 28 days from SimilarWeb, another web and app analytics firm, also pegs Amazon ahead of homegrown Flipkart in app downloads, indicating that the former has been able to sustain the momentum even into the second and third quarters.

The same trend was visible on Tuesday and Wednesday when TOI looked at top downloaded apps in India on Google Play Store. Amazon.in was at the No. 11 spot on both days, while Flipkart was at No. 17 on Tuesday and No. 16 on Wednesday.

On the web, Flipkart lost to Amazon India late last year. The data then came from comScore, a leading website traffic analysing platform. The gap seems to have widened since then. A SimilarWeb report that included the combined traffic on desktop and mobile web and released on Tuesday listed Amazon India at 128 among the top 300 websites globally. Flipkart was placed at 223. The scores are calculated based on the number of unique visitors and the number of page views, in order to demonstrate both quantity and quality of site.


“While Flipkart has reduced its sale events and advertisements on media, Amazon continues to spend money on media and naturally tends to get more people to download the app. The Amazon app quality is also better since it is a global technology platform. Indications are that Amazon might be very close to Flipkart or already ahead in sales,“ said Harish HV, partner at audit firm Grant Thornton. He noted though that these data sets do not reveal any information about the value of the goods sold on the platforms.

Notwithstanding downloads, Amazon still trails Flipkart in monthly active users on the mobile app, the App Annie data shows. SimilarWeb also finds Flipkart to be ahead of Amazon in active app usage. While 4.5% of Flipkart users launched the app every day, only 2.7% of Amazon users did so daily. Consumers also spend more time on the Flipkart app (8.25 minutes per session) than on Amazon (6.2 minutes). But if the recent app download trends continue, the gap in usage may shrink.