A new report from BofA Global Research, based on Sensor Tower data, has put out a ranking of the apps Indians spend the most time on every month, and the numbers are a reminder of just how much of daily life in the country now runs through a handful of screens.
Instagram tops the list, with the average Indian user spending 49 hours and 42 minutes on the app every month. That works out to well over an hour and a half a day, on an app that started out as a photo-sharing service and has since turned into India’s default entertainment feed. YouTube isn’t far behind at 47 hours and 23 minutes, which puts the two apps roughly 80 minutes apart in monthly usage, both comfortably ahead of everything else on the list.
The real surprise is at number three. Garena’s Free Fire, the battle royale game that was banned in India in 2022 and relaunched a year later with MS Dhoni as brand ambassador, clocks in at 41 hours and 12 minutes a month. That’s more time than Indians spend on Facebook, JioHotstar, or Netflix, and it says something about how deeply gaming has embedded itself into the country’s mobile habits, especially among users who came online through cheap data and never really left.
Facebook rounds out the top four at 24 hours and 45 minutes, a fraction of what Instagram commands but still ahead of every streaming and messaging app on the chart. JioHotstar, the merged entity that came out of the Reliance-Disney tie-up, sits at 22 hours and 13 minutes, making it the highest-ranked Indian platform on the list. The company has been leaning hard into AI-focused roles as it builds out a dedicated artificial intelligence division, and with 300 million subscribers across the country, it has plenty of viewing time to try and hold onto.
Netflix and MX Player are almost tied at just over 19 hours a month, while WhatsApp Messenger, the app most Indians probably assume they use the most, comes in at 18 hours and 49 minutes. That’s a useful data point on its own. WhatsApp is where most people spend their attention in short, frequent bursts throughout the day, but it still trails Instagram and YouTube by a wide margin because those platforms are built for long, uninterrupted scrolling sessions.
Further down the list are the short-video and local content apps that emerged after TikTok’s ban in 2020 — PLAYit, Kuku TV, and Moj — sitting between 15 and 18 hours a month. These platforms have carved out a durable niche among users looking for regional-language content and lighter entertainment, even as Instagram Reels has become the default short-video product for most of the country.
Zoom Workplace, at 14 hours and 1 minute, is the only productivity app to make the list, a small signal of how much of India’s white-collar workforce still runs meetings through it. Amazon Prime Video, Ludo King, X, WhatsApp Business, Carrom Pool, Reddit, Google Chrome, and ZEE5 fill out the rest of the chart, with ZEE5 closing things out at 10 hours and 44 minutes.
Split by origin, the list is a mix of nine Indian platforms and eleven global ones, and the gap between the two groups isn’t as wide as it might have been five years ago. JioHotstar, PLAYit, Kuku TV, Moj, Ludo King, and ZEE5 all hold their own against international apps built with far bigger budgets, which is a reasonable outcome for a market that has spent the last several years building its own alternatives to foreign platforms it briefly lost access to.
What the numbers ultimately point to is a country where video, in one form or another, eats up almost all the time people spend on their phones. Between Instagram, YouTube, JioHotstar, Netflix, MX Player, PLAYit, and Kuku TV, seven of the top nine slots on this list are occupied by apps built primarily around watching something, and Free Fire is the only real outlier, proving gaming can still out-consume video when the product gets the formula right.