Five out of the top 10 mobile apps in India were made by developers from China, compared with just two at the end of 2017, thanks to a strategy of localising content and using the right marketing techniques, a report in Factor Daily stated.

Top titles include social content platforms Helo and ShareIt, entertainment apps TikTok, Like and Kwai, and games such as PUBG, Clash of Kings and Mobile Legends, along with a slew of products offering live streaming and utility features.

ByteDance, parent company of Helo and TikTok, is one of the biggest success stories.

Helo was launched in July 2018 and had 13 million downloads in India by the end of the year, while TikTok “has consistently ranked among the top five Android apps in India since June 2018 and counts 39 per cent of its over 500 million global active users from India,” the report said.

“For Chinese companies in any sector, India is the only market that has the possibility of being as big as their market. There’s no other market that’d even come close,” Ramakrishna Velamuri, a professor at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, said.

The publication also stated “deep pockets for marketing expense, focus on vernacular India users, an addictive user interface, racy content, quick iterations and execution cycles, and cheap offerings,” as attributes the app makers had in common.

Other advantages were a “high level of technological sophistication that Indian platforms lack”, and the fact that most of the developers have a team in India dedicated to giving the apps a local flavour.