The UPI payment based App – BHIM, which was launched late last year has now been downloaded over 1.1 crore times, claims Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s Information Technology Minister. BHIM was launched on December 30th, 2016 which makes it one of the few apps to reach the milestone of 10 million (or 1 crore) downloads in such as short span of time.
BHIM (Bharat Interface For Money) is a simplified payment platform to facilitate UPI (Unified Payment Interface) and USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) payment methods. As of now, the app is only available on Google Play Store and works in English or Hindi language. Being a Central Government initiative, most of the Indian commercial banks are already on board for this payment system including State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, Bank of India, Canara Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce and Punjab National Bank, among others.
Also See: How to Install and Transact through BHIM
However, Ravi Shankar claims that some of the flaws including the addition of the remaining banks, such as State Bank of India (SBI), is being worked upon and an update will be rolled out in near future. One can also pay through USSD via BHIM.
Meanwhile, as per a report from a company named App Annie (a global analytics firm), India has been ranked number one in terms of app download from Google Play Store in India. To compare, India was placed third in 2015. The second place was bagged by the United States, and Brazil took the third spot. China being not a part of this race due to its policy towards Google, has been ranked number one in terms of Apple’s App Store downloads. Further, India also bagged the first position in terms of total time spent on apps. To put in figures, out of the total 900 billion app hours spent, India spent about 150 billion hours on Android apps last year.
This surely is a good sign for India as a smartphone market, however, the ratio of people using smartphones to that of the whole population of the country is still quite low at 30%.