What does the Ban on Chinese apps tell us?

Well, we all know the reason behind the ban. But it is an interesting fact we can observe from this event that, there were hundreds of Chinese apps installed on our phones and we were frequently using it.

Why these apps were Made in China and Not ‘Made in India’?

Let’s see, we as Indians can’t think of ideas behind these android/iOS apps? - Well not exactly, Indians are very creative people. We could easily think of CamScanner to scan documents because it is a very intuitive function.

We don’t have the resources to build these apps? - India is a 4.5 trillion USD economy with a number of Billionaires hailing from India. As a matter of fact, Microsoft CEO, Google-Alphabet CEO, Adobe CEO are of India origin

Do we have a skillset to build these apps? - Well, probably No! and that is the reason we couldn’t build these apps earlier compared to Chinese.

How China is different compared to Indians when it comes to building Apps/Websites/Games?

China works on building ecosystems. There is Zhejiang Province in China which builds 30% of socks produced worldwide. It is highly likely that the socks you are wearing now are produced in that province. There the eco-system has multiple integrated factories. Like a factory to process cotton followed by a factory to weave the cotton into the fabric to make socks. Then a factory to make the actual socks in all colours, size and patterns. Then there is also a factory dedicated to packaging these socks, which is followed by a port to ship these socks world-wide.

When it comes to Coding, programming or building Apps, Websites and Games. Chinese start teaching these skillsets to students from a very early age. So when these students come across any problems they not only think about the solutions but also build at least the MVP - Minimum Viable Product of these solutions. If these solutions are intuitive and easy to adopt, people start using it worldwide and that’s how any famous app is built. It doesn’t mean China has a lot of Chintus :p China in addition to the coding curriculum provides complimentary business knowledge to their students which usually takes a Post Graduate degree in India to learn. So someone builds an app, someone immediately takes care of marketing and sales, someone looks after the finance and the companies like Softbank and Ant financials are ready with their deep pockets to fund these ideas and apps.

What can we do to make India better in these areas?

We need to focus on the growing areas in technology, we need to identify and acknowledge the changes in the market needs. For example, when ATM machines came, we didn’t see teller jobs disappearing from Banks but they definitely didn’t grow. The jobs which grew instead were the ones which built technology for these ATM machines and branch-less banking systems. We need to identify such transformations and impart the education accordingly. Coding and programming is a very wide area. In that specifically, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning are the areas which will be in high demand going ahead. We need to teach students about these technologies from early on in their lives.