by Meta-app achieves 2 million downloads in week one; users download it, forget about it, find it on page 8 of phone
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
India Satirical News: There’s An App For That, And That, And That
BANGALORE — AppDeleteMe, a new productivity application from Bangalore-based startup CleanSlate Technologies, promises to analyse the 47-plus apps on your smartphone, identify which ones you have not opened in thirty days, and recommend which to delete in order to “reclaim your digital life, improve battery performance, and reduce the anxiety of a home screen that looks like a Tetris game designed by someone with seventeen hobbies and no time.” The app achieved 2 million downloads in its first week, which is an extraordinary number that its founder, Rohan Sethi, described as “validation of a genuine user need.”
The app has since been downloaded by its 2 million users and used by approximately 340,000 of them, as indicated by active user metrics that Rohan Sethi presents to investors as “strong engagement with room for growth,” which is the startup vocabulary for “most people downloaded it and then forgot it exists,” which is what the app itself is designed to address, creating the most elegant irony in the Indian app economy since a mindfulness application was discovered to be the second most used app on phones classified as “high anxiety usage” by their owners.
The Indian Smartphone: A Small Society
The average Indian smartphone, particularly in the 25-40 urban demographic, contains: two UPI payment apps (PhonePe for daily use, GPay for when PhonePe is down, Paytm from 2017 that has not been opened since 2019), three food delivery apps (Zomato for habit, Swiggy for when Zomato has higher surge pricing, Zepto for when you need something in ten minutes and are willing to pay for that feeling), two streaming platforms (Netflix subscribed, Amazon Prime free with the shopping, Hotstar for IPL and nothing else, Disney+ which is Hotstar under a different name, Sony LIV which your father uses and you downloaded to share his account), and a collection of government apps acquired during moments of civic responsibility that have since been forgotten.
Technology analysts at Reuters note that India is the world’s second-largest smartphone market and the largest market for data consumption in the world — Indians collectively use more mobile data than any other country — a fact that tells you something important about what 1.4 billion people with affordable smartphones and the world’s cheapest data plans actually do with them, which is: everything, constantly, in every context including several contexts where phone use was previously socially discouraged and now is merely socially observed.
The App Economy: A Triumph Of Availability Over Need
The Indian app market is the most competitive and least profit-maximising in the world, primarily because Jio’s data price revolution in 2016 established the expectation that digital services are essentially free, which has produced an ecosystem of extraordinary variety and challenging unit economics. Apps are downloaded by the hundred million, monetised by advertising or transaction fees, and deleted or forgotten with the casual relationship to software that comes from having eight gigabytes of storage and forty-seven applications competing for it.
AppDeleteMe’s genuine insight is that the problem it solves — phone clutter, attention fragmentation, the low-grade anxiety of a notification ecosystem that demands more than you can give — is real, documented by research, and growing as smartphone ownership deepens. Its business model challenge is that solving this problem requires engagement from people who are, by definition, already experiencing attention difficulties, which is like solving insomnia by asking people to fill out a form at 2 AM.
Rohan Sethi: Still Optimistic
Rohan Sethi is 26 and has the specific energy of someone who genuinely believes his app will help people and has not yet had to present the monthly active user numbers to a Series A investor who has studied the industry-standard engagement curves for productivity apps. That meeting is scheduled for June. We wish him well. AppDeleteMe is, genuinely, a useful idea. The question, as with all useful ideas, is whether it is a business.
India satirical news, decluttered: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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