India Realizing its Potential as Mega Mobile Market, 4th in Android Downloads Worldwide

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has announced today that Android developers in India can now sell paid applications, in-app items, and subscriptions on the Google Play platform. Developers can collect payments on a monthly basis via their bank accounts.

This follows news yesterday that Android smartphone users in India would be able to buy apps in Indian Rupees after October 25.

Google also revealed some incredible figures about Android adoption in the Indian market, most notably that India is now the fourth largest market in the world in terms of downloads, with device activations up 400 percent in the last year. We understand that Japan and Korea are second and third respectively in terms of downloads, and (while it hasn’t been announced) presumably the US is number one.

Analyst Chetan Sharma noted back in May that while India has the world’s second largest total of mobile subscribers (behind China), it isn’t even in the top ten in data revenue or data usage. So its encouraging to hear this news from Google that things finally look to be picking up on the smartphone side.

The 2012 data we received from Tapjoy a few weeks back indicated that India is one of the Asian countries which leans far more in favor of Android than iOS.

Looking at Google’s ‘Our Mobile Planet’ survey, we can also see that Indian smartphone users look to be more passionate about their handsets than some other countries, with 49 percent of those surveyed saying they would prefer to give up their TV than their smartphone.