India is the world’s second largest mobile phone market, trailing only China. A report by Internet and Mobile Association of India 
(IAMAI) and market research firm IMRB International states that the number of local language Internet users in India is growing at 47% year-on-year and has touched 127 million as of June 2015. Needless to say, increased use of smartphones in rural areas is a major contributor to this trend. A vast majority of India’s population prefers consuming online content in their native languages over English. Yet, Indian languages account for less than 0.1percent of content on the internet while English language content accounts for 56 percent. India has a large scope for local language content as non-English speaking population constitutes 88% of the population. To cater to these vast numbers, the mobile app industry, across genres, is developing -–apps with regional language facility. News aggregators such as UC News, Newshunt, InShort and DailyHunt are focusing on the native Indian languages to cater to the ‘next billion’ Indian Internet users.
NewsHunt is an Indian-made application that brings latest news from various newspapers of different states. Though its main sources are newspapers, you can get instant updates as well. This application is available for Android, iOS and Windows Phone and supports different local languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali and more
UC News, – newest player on the block. UC News is a news aggregator app from Alibaba Mobile Business Group that brings latest updates along with social media trending news for its users. UC News is currently available in English & Hindi and Tamil and promises to add multiple local languages very soon. This is the one-stop source of trending and curated news content covering all the popular categories of news with 20+ featured channels including news, cricket, technology, entertainment, movies, lifestyle, health, humour and more.
Inshorts – Indian version of Flipboard which provides you news in a crisp and crunchy manner. Inshorts aggregates news and other content such as videos, infographics, and blogs, and summarizes them in 60 words or less but you can read full-fledged story by clicking any piece which you want. They recently entered the vernacular market with a Hindi interface of their app. They are also planning to expand to other regional languages such as Marathi, Kannada, and Tamil.
DailyHunt provides aggregated news across a variety of topics such as politics, business, technology, and Bollywood etc. The news is also available in local Indian languages – Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bangla, Gujarati, Urdu, Oriya & Punjabi. The app is available for users in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, UAE, Africa, and India and supports 15 languages.
