[App Fridays] India's 10 Best Smartphone Apps for the Year 2012

Friday December 28, 2012 , 5 min Read

The mobile ecosystem is vast and in recent times, the apps vertical has seen a rapid upsurge. Gone are the days when a mobility company required hundreds of resources, large amounts of infrastructure and powerful corporate contacts to run. Today, a single person or a small team working from their respective homes, can build a successful mobile company in the app vertical. In the words of the Investor and Serial entrepreneur, Ravi Gururaj, “You can make your millions by an app without ever having to take a flight!”

Here are YourStory, we have had the absolute pleasure of having reviewed and written about some amazing apps from India, which have the potential of taking over the world. Some of them are already living up to their potential by securing funding and acquiring a massive user base. After much deliberation, we have brought it down to 10 apps, which deserve to be mentioned in our end of the year note. 2012 belonged to the following apps -

Hubbl

An app solving the problem of app discovery would have been deemed as absurd, but Hubbl is just that. With a few hundred thousand downloads under its belt, this app allows you to discover new apps. It learns your likes and dislikes from your social graphs and is supported by the iHub platform which we will soon write about. Very soon.

Panorama 360

A part of the current batch of 500 Startups, 360 degrees is almost an instagram for panoramic shots. Despite having the panoramic shot feature in the stock android camera itself, its social and sharing functions along with being a very good panoramic shot app itself, 360 degrees has close to a million users. We haven’t had the chance to review this yet, but social-photo apps have definitely pulled a few surprises this past year.

NowFloats

SoLoMo never looked as good as it does in NowFloats. This tastefully designed app is a location based social network and a local deals and business discovery platform. There have been many apps in the this category that we have reviewed, but this one was by the best to use. It needs more users for it to work in some areas, but in the age of the apps, nothing can stop an app with a great design from becoming successful.

IntouchApp

Our very own Tech30 company, Intouch app from Volare is a contact management app which works across smartphone platforms. Having only launched a month back, the app has seen considerable downloads and now manages over a million contacts. With phone manufacturers providing better and better alternatives, IntouchApp can rid you of the worry of having to transfer your contacts.

Delight Circle

Customer loyalty has seen a compatible partner in mobile apps and delight circle is the leading app in this category. With aggressive marketing and a great app itself, Delight Circle can be used to find deals, collect loyalty points and redeem them at many outlets across India, including marquee retail chains, such as Reliance.

Deck

It is easy to discount what this Q-Prize winning app does. It makes beautiful presentations for you. Once the text is entered into the app, Deck provides preset slide templates with pre-programmed animations for the user to choose from and formats it automatically. This not only makes great presentations, but also allows making presentations on mobile devices complete and easy.

Hike

A potential Whatsapp killer, Hike’s emphasis on design is immaculate. Made in delhi, the app has shown a tenfold growth in a few months and is now being slowly adopted in many countries around the world. Along with IM messaging, the app also provides free SMS functionality, which is user pleaser. With over a 100,000 downloads, Hike is a great messaging app to use.

Paperboy

There is a large emphasis on localized news and Paperboy is one the best looking apps in this category to come from India. A beautiful interface and an easy to navigate UX, the app has comprehensive Indian content on it. For a great user experience and functions that optimize the apps performance despite Indian network conditions, check out Paperboy.

WooMe

WooMe enables customer engagement through advertisements on TV and Radio. From pushing deals to running contests, WooMe comes alive when a TV or Radio advertisement is running. Having tied up with some big brands like Pepsodent and MTV Roadies in 2012, it is a going to be a very interesting 2013 for WooMe.

Maluuba

A Siri-like app that doesn’t talk back, Maluuba is the voice assistant for the Indian. It completely understands accents and has a minimal and easy to use interface which you can read more of in our review of the app. The app runs across different versions of Android, providing the voice support of 4.1 to devices running lesser versions. If you’re into talking to your phone (literally) this is for you.