Snapchat's India userbase more than doubled in April-June quarter

Indian users on Snapchat more than doubled in the last quarter, co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel told analysts during an earnings call. However, he did not disclose Snapchat’s user base country wise. In Q2, the company added 9 million daily users worldwide.

“We see a significant opportunity to continue to grow our community as we further invest in localization of our product through language support, local content and marketing partnerships across a variety of geographies,” the CEO said.

Snapchat saw an increase of 17% year-over-year to 238 million daily active users, and revenue grew 17% year-over-year to $454 million.

“We are also continuing to invest in app performance and localization to make our service more accessible to people all over the world, with Snapchat now available to over 2 billion people in their native language. These efforts have helped us grow even faster in emerging markets like India, where we've seen over 100% growth in daily active users over the past year,” he said.

This is important because Snapchat user experience on Apple was much better and worked more reliably than on Android (which was widely criticised), and in April 2019, the company finally released a revamped Android app. With a huge majority (up to 91% by some estimates) of India’s phones running on Android, the adoption seems to have rapidly increased in these markets.

Support for nine Indian languages has been added in the last year alone. These include Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi.

In their previous earnings call, Spiegel had said that one of the things that has worked really well for them “has been releasing custom and culturally relevant augmented reality experiences and increasingly more content.”

“...we're continuing to localize the product and onboard local content, local creators and building local AR experiences, which we've seen the increased engagement. So definitely lots of investment there. But really excited that the fundamentals are in place and they are showing up in the growth,” Spiegel said.

CFO Derek Anderson said that they see an opportunity to grow as they invest more in localising their product through language support, local content and marketing partnerships.