Your Next 100 Million Users Don't Speak English. Are You Building for Them?
The English internet in India is full
The metros are saturated. Every English-speaking, card-carrying, fast-wifi user already has the apps they need. The next wave of Indian internet users — the genuinely huge one — is in tier 2, tier 3 and beyond. They're on cheaper phones and patchier networks, and they think, search and shop in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali and a dozen more languages.
If your product only speaks English, you've quietly capped your own market.
"Bharat" is not just translation
The lazy approach is to run your app through a translation tool and call it localised. It fails, because building for Bharat is about behaviour, not just language:
- Voice over typing. Many users find it far easier to speak than to type, especially in scripts that are clumsy on a keyboard. Voice search and voice input aren't nice-to-haves here.
- Video and visuals over walls of text. Dense paragraphs lose people. Short video, clear icons and strong imagery win.
- Trust signals that fit. UPI, cash-on-delivery, familiar payment flows and social proof in their own language.
- Light and forgiving. Works on a ₹8,000 phone, survives a dropped connection and doesn't devour their limited data.
The opportunity nobody's fully grabbed
Here's the exciting part: most well-funded products are still building English-first for the metros. That leaves the largest, fastest-growing slice of the market wide open for whoever takes it seriously. The brands that win Bharat won't have the slickest English UI — they'll be the ones that made a first-time internet user feel instantly at home.
India isn't one market. It's a stack of markets in different languages, and most of them are still waiting for someone to build for them properly.
You don't have to ship twelve languages on day one. Pick the two that matter most to your users, do them genuinely well — voice, visuals, payments and all — and you'll learn more than any metro A/B test could teach you.