Apps Across Various Domains: From Augmented Reality to Finance

Open your phone right now and count the apps on your home screen. Chances are you will find a payments app, a food delivery app, a shopping app, and at least one streaming service, all sitting quietly alongside a voice assistant you talk to more than you realise. Apps have stopped being a single category of software and have become the operating layer of everyday life. Each domain, whether it is augmented reality, artificial intelligence, retail, food, finance, or entertainment, solves a very specific problem, and understanding how these apps are designed and monetised is central to studying app-based commerce. Let us walk through the major domains apps now serve, using the platforms you already use every day as examples.

Augmented and virtual reality apps that blend the real and digital worlds 🔗

Augmented reality (AR) apps overlay digital elements onto the physical world through a phone camera or headset, while virtual reality (VR) apps immerse users in a fully simulated environment. Pokémon Go remains the textbook example of AR gone mainstream: it placed animated creatures on real streets and parks, turning ordinary walks into treasure hunts and proving that AR could drive both engagement and foot traffic to local businesses.

Retail has picked up the same idea for commercial use. AR shopping apps now let customers try on makeup shades, preview furniture in their own living rooms, or see how a pair of glasses looks before buying, cutting down on returns and building buyer confidence. In India, beauty and furniture brands are increasingly experimenting with these “try before you buy” features inside their shopping apps, since a large share of online buyers still hesitate over fit, size, and colour.

Why AR and VR matter for commerce 🔗

These apps reduce the gap between online and offline shopping. A customer no longer needs to visit a store to judge how a product will look or fit; the app recreates that experience virtually. This is particularly useful for categories like fashion, cosmetics, home décor, and eyewear, where visual fit drives the buying decision.

Artificial intelligence apps that think alongside you 🔗

AI-powered apps use machine learning and natural language processing to understand requests and respond intelligently. Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa are the most recognisable examples, handling everything from setting reminders to answering trivia questions using just your voice.

In India, voice assistants have moved well beyond novelty use. Google Assistant is reportedly relied upon by around 65 percent of Indian users for search and navigation queries, and companies are investing heavily in multilingual support to serve the country’s many regional languages. Retail and food-delivery platforms are also building voice search directly into their apps, letting users search for products or reorder meals by speaking in Hindi or English rather than typing.

AI as a silent partner in retail 🔗

Beyond voice assistants, AI works quietly in the background of most commerce apps you use. It powers product recommendations, fraud detection in payment apps, and personalised meal suggestions on food delivery platforms. This “invisible AI” is often more influential on your daily app experience than any assistant you speak to directly.

Retail shopping apps and the new digital marketplace 🔗

Retail shopping apps such as Amazon and Flipkart have essentially replaced the neighbourhood mall for a large segment of Indian consumers. These apps combine product discovery, price comparison, secure checkout, and doorstep delivery into a single experience.

Tier-2 and tier-3 cities have become a major growth driver for Indian e-commerce, with smaller cities posting sharp year-on-year growth and contributing a large share of order volumes during major sale events. This signals that shopping apps are no longer a metro-city habit; they have penetrated deep into small towns where physical retail choice is limited. Big sale events like Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Amazon’s Great Indian Festival have become cultural moments in their own right, driving massive spikes in downloads and transactions within just a few weeks.

What makes a retail app sticky 🔗

Successful shopping apps rely on a mix of features that keep users coming back:

• Personalised recommendations: algorithms that learn from browsing and purchase history
• Flexible payment options: cash on delivery, UPI, EMI, and buy-now-pay-later
• Fast, trackable delivery: real-time order tracking and reliable logistics networks
• Vernacular support: regional language interfaces to reach non-English-speaking users

Food delivery apps feeding urban convenience 🔗

Food delivery apps like Uber Eats internationally, and Swiggy and Zomato in India, connect restaurants and cloud kitchens directly to hungry customers through a smartphone. The convenience of ordering a meal in a few taps has fundamentally changed dining habits in Indian cities.

Zomato commands close to 60 percent of India’s online food delivery market, competing closely with Swiggy as both platforms expand into quick commerce and hyperlocal delivery services. Delivery speed has become the newest battleground, with platforms racing to shrink delivery windows to fifteen minutes or less for select menus.

Beyond just food 🔗

Food delivery apps have quietly evolved into broader convenience platforms. Many now deliver groceries, medicines, and daily essentials through the same app, using the delivery fleet they originally built for meals. This diversification shows how a single-purpose app can expand into an entire ecosystem once it earns a place on a customer’s home screen.

Banking and finance apps putting the bank in your pocket 🔗

Perhaps no domain illustrates the power of app-based commerce better than banking and finance. Apps like Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm run on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a payment system built by the National Payments Corporation of India that allows instant, account-to-account money transfers using just a mobile number or QR code.

UPI’s annual transaction volume expanded from about two crore transactions in its first year of operation to over 24,000 crore transactions in FY 2025-26, an almost 12,000-fold surge, making it one of the largest real-time payment systems anywhere in the world. UPI now accounts for the vast majority of India’s digital retail payments, processing tens of billions of transactions every month.

Financial inclusion through the app store 🔗

What makes UPI-based apps significant beyond convenience is financial inclusion. A vegetable vendor with a basic smartphone can now accept digital payments as easily as a large retail chain, without needing a card machine or merchant account with a bank. This has pulled millions of small, informal businesses into the formal digital economy for the first time.

Video streaming apps changing how India watches 🔗

Streaming apps like Netflix and JioHotstar have replaced appointment television with on-demand, personalised viewing. Users choose what to watch, when to watch it, and on which device, from a smartphone during a commute to a smart TV at home.

JioHotstar, formed from the merger of Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema, crossed 280 million subscribers within months of its launch, closing in on Netflix’s global subscriber base. Live sports, particularly cricket, has been a major driver of this growth, with major tournaments pulling in digital audiences that now exceed traditional television viewership in India.

Regional content as a growth engine 🔗

Streaming apps in India increasingly compete on regional-language content rather than English programming alone. Platforms are investing heavily in Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and other regional catalogues, recognising that language, not just price, decides whether a subscriber stays or churns.

How these app domains compare 🔗

The common thread across every domain 🔗

Despite serving very different needs, apps across these domains share a common design goal: reduce friction. An AR app removes the friction of physically trying on a product. A UPI app removes the friction of carrying cash or a card. A food delivery app removes the friction of cooking or dining out. Studying app-based commerce, then, is really studying how businesses identify a specific point of friction in daily life and design a mobile experience to remove it, while building a business model, whether through commission, subscription, or advertising, around that convenience.

What do you think? Which of these app domains do you think has changed daily life in India the most, entertainment, payments, or shopping? And as AI features get built into more of these apps, do you think that convenience will keep growing, or will users start pushing back on how much data these apps collect to power that convenience?

References

1. https://www.shopify.com/in/blog/augmented-reality-apps
2. https://www.nextmsc.com/news/india-voice-assistant-market
3. https://www.ibef.org/industry/ecommerce
4. https://www.expertmarketresearch.com/reports/india-online-food-delivery-market
5. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2257087
6. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2025/india-upi-the-global-benchmark-for-digital-payments
7. https://www.business-standard.com/companies/news/jiohotstar-second-to-netflix-with-280-million-subscribers-125052701396_1.html