Days after the launch of Apple’s App Store, the company’s late co-founder Steve Jobs announced: “The App Store is a grand slam, with a staggering 10 million applications downloaded in just three days.” The fact is: Even after almost 17 years, the go-to marketplace for all apps remains the backbone of Apple as developers continue to rush in.
Today, more than 99.99 per cent of iOS apps are made by third-party developers, resulting in a growing and competitive marketplace that contributes towards a positive user experience. India’s thriving community of app developers now supports more than one million jobs.
Ahead of WWDC 2025, which begins on June 9, t2oS spoke to the people behind three promising apps from India and here’s what they have to say.
CricHeroes: scoring boundaries
Throughout the year, hundreds of cricket tournaments are played across India and beyond. Think beyond IPL and even Ranji Trophy. It has been happening for a long time, but the problem was how stakeholders — players, umpires, scorekeepers and so on — network.
Launched in 2016, CricHeroes is on a mission to give grassroots cricketers a platform to showcase their talent and get recognised. Today, it has over 35 million registered users across India and over 100 countries. The platform digitally scores over 400,000 matches every month, making it the world’s largest repository of grassroots cricket data.
Orchestrating the action is Abhishek Desai, founder of CricHeroes. “We have been able to generate a lot of income for scorers, umpires and commentators at a grassroots level. Before CricHeroes, it was very difficult for them to get new business. Also, we have been able to create a lot of business for new tournament organisers. For people who organise tournaments as a hobby, CricHeroes is an efficient platform to promote tournaments and get more teams. It has also made a difference in the lives of business owners around cricket, such as bat, ball, and uniform manufacturers. They can promote their business on our platform,” Desai told this newspaper.
Before CricHeroes, he used to run a company called Digicorp with a few friends. The idea was to build software for the world. “We could work with a lot of companies, specifically early-stage companies at that time, who came to us with an idea and some capital. We could build the entire tech product end-to-end for them. So that way, we got exposure to the startup world much before the startup world was cool in India. This is 2004-05. It also created an itch to create something on our own. Whatever we were building as part of Digicorp, it was a service company. So all our creations were for our clients; it was not our IP. We got fascinated with some of those journeys, which we could witness in front of us. We tried our hand at multiple ideas, and one of those ideas was also a food delivery app — like Swiggy — in 2007. It was called PetPooja. We could not scale those ideas to a meaningful level, probably because we were naive and did not have a larger vision,” said Desai, who started his academic journey at Nirma Institute of Technology, where he studied computer engineering.
CricHeroes takes advantage of all the cool features of iPhone and Apple Watch. There are seamless multi-platform experiences to help live streaming of grassroots games with real-time score overlays. There are AI-powered highlights, automatically generating key moments from any match.
GO Club: Step Counter is a steps-and-calorie tracker
“After every match I played with friends, we discussed the game. Every cricketer will discuss it over chai or before a game, they would strategise. All those discussions would happen without any data. Some of my friends were scoring those matches on paper-based score sheets. It was very difficult to get meaningful data or insights from those paper-based score sheets, because after the match, those were gone. I realised this was not just a problem for my lot, but also a problem for a lot of cricketers like me. I saw an opportunity,” said the founder.
The company was registered in July 2016, and in October 2016, Desai launched the first version of the product, which was a very simple scorekeeping app. It allowed you to score your match, and you could see your score live, ball to ball, on a dedicated link.
“Over time, we realised that the market is huge. It is not just the Sunday matches, but a lot of people play tournament matches. We created modules for tournament organisers. Then we asked: What are cricket associations doing? They were still using paper. We could make them take scores digitally. We created special modules for them. Slowly, our product became an end-to-end package for the grassroots cricket ecosystem and not just cricketers.”
The company is trying to ride the AI wave with some meaningful features. “We were doing a lot of live streaming, and ‘highlights’ was a serious requirement from our users. People want highlights of their game. AI came in handy, so after every livestream match, we give the video to an AI engine, which creates highlights for every player who has played in that match, creates a separate video for their innings, and that video we can attach to their profiles.”
Finma is a native iOS app built exclusively for the iPhone
Another area where AI is trying to score boundaries is building DRS (decision review system) for grassroots cricket. “We are building a one-camera DRS module. An umpire can put a mobile phone near the chest using a specially designed strap. If there is a DRS appeal, the umpire can see what happened in the last ball. We will show him ball tracking and whether the ball was hitting the stump or not. If AI is making you money, go ahead, otherwise, it can be an expensive proposition,” said Abhishek, who spent a lot of his school days playing football, and in college, he started taking cricket more seriously.
He is thankful to Apple for many of the features that CricHeroes like. “The live activity widget allows you to follow our match on your locked screen. You don’t even have to open the app. That has been a very stable innovation from Apple. If you are following any sport, it continues for hours, so live activity is a cool innovation. Then the control centre widgets, which have allowed us to put some shortcuts right there on your lock screen. The latest innovation is Apple’s Image Playground, which helps you create AI avatars of profile pictures and your team icons.”
GO Club: Step Counter — Walking for health
Walk, Don’t Run, goes the hit 1960 song. Ranjith Ramanan and Kamal Kumar Lakshmanan, two loved names in India’s Formula 1 community, believe walking helps to stay fit. After delivering a gem of an app called Box Box Club, the duo is back with a new offering — GO Club: Step Counter.
CricHeroes gives grassroots cricketers a platform to showcase their talent, get recognised, and become better cricketers
It is a ‘steps and calorie tracker’, but there is much to the app beyond the simple description. The app’s simple and clean dashboard helps to focus on the right things, like steps, calories burned, and floors climbed. The data is integrated with Apple’s HealthKit framework.
“While we were going on this journey of three years of building Box Box Club, one thing we noticed was that we were always in front of our computers and not taking care of our health, at least not a great deal. This has been a problem for so many people since work from home took off around Covid. We realised that the simplest form of workout anyone can do is walking. We considered that as the foundation and built GO Club as a simple steps-and-calorie tracker for the casual user,” said Kamal Kumar Lakshmanan, co-founder and CTO, GO Club.
Lakshmanan is an experienced developer with 11-plus years developing for Apple platforms. He has a track record of developing highly regarded apps in domains such as healthcare, defence, fintech, e-commerce and more.
Keeping him company is Ranjith Ramanan, who brings over 16 years of product design experience. By leveraging his strong design skills and user-centred approach, he aims to create intuitive and compelling products that solve real problems and meet the needs of our users.
GO Club takes advantage of the Weather Kit. “People staying in huge apartments and high-rise buildings have a common issue involving Vitamin D deficiency. They need to go on walks in nice sunny weather to get their daily Vitamin D intake. For countries like Australia, the sun can be harmful… the UV radiation is high. They need to go for a walk at the right time of day. Then there are places where people wonder if it is going to be a snowy day or a rainy day,” said Lakshmanan.
The app can take into consideration the location, UV index, sunrise time, sunset time, and much more to calculate the perfect time for you to take the next walk.
“Beginners often ask: How many steps do I need to walk? During onboarding, we ask users very simple questions. What is their primary goal? Do you want to stay fit every day, or do you want to lose some weight? Then we ask some follow-up questions about what your target is and when you want to achieve it. We create a plan using AI. We have a disclaimer stating that just walking a mile will not help you meet your goals. It has to be a workout plus a diet. At the end of the day, we ask users to reflect on their day. We tell them how many steps they have taken and the average heart rate,” said Lakshmanan.
Important to the app is privacy. “We reached out to Apple Developer Centre in Bengaluru. They helped with creating the perfect plan to keep user data private and secure. All the healthcare information never leaves your device, and the AI never stores your data; it just processes and gives you a proper plan. And we made sure that none of the data is going to our server.”
A cool feature on the app is Hydration tracker. More you stay hydrated, the better it is for you... and the visual experience of the app.
Having worked on Box Box Club, the team knows a thing or two about widgets. It makes the experience seamless.
“We have always believed in design-led engineering. Is it simple to use? Will you be using it? These are some of the questions that we keep asking ourselves. With GO Club, you are joining a community of users. We learnt the importance of widgets from Box Box Club. Users don’t always want to open apps and go through everything. At times, they just want the information that’s readily available on the lock screen. We took advantage of widgets once again.”
Finma: Intelligent financial choices
Usually, in our wallets, we have a few debit and credit cards. Money comes in and flies out, but there are times when we don’t even realise how we have spent it. Finma is a native iOS app built exclusively for the iPhone. The objective is to automate expense tracking across multiple bank accounts and credit cards, keeping everything private and on-device to avoid giving access to private information.
“Finma was created to solve two major pain points. First, automating expense tracking across multiple banks and credit cards. Second, I wanted to keep everything private and on-device,” said Tanmay Sonawane, founder, Finma.
He is an independent iOS developer from Mumbai who has been building iPhone and Mac apps for close to 15 years now. He started off in 2012 with his first app: a birthday reminder. Ever since, he has built apps across categories of note-taking, SMS spam blockers, music, productivity and so on.
Finma uses Apple frameworks such as WidgetKit, Charts, PDFKit and Shortcuts. All the charts are animated and interactive, PDFs processed on-device using PDFKit and transaction SMS are processed using Shortcuts automation. Apple’s focus on ensuring privacy aligns perfectly with Finma and how any finance app should be — private and all user data on-device.
App developers from around the world will gather at Apple Park for WWDC between June 9 and 13
“The team at Apple helped with feedback on the app. I redesigned the onboarding process. Earlier, the home screen used to be cluttered with seven or eight widgets, overwhelming the user. I worked with the team at Apple to fix this,” Sonawane told t2oS.
The widgets on the app offer an overview of one’s spending habits. All the widgets are interactive. “The focus is turning boring data into something beautiful and easy to understand.”
His app has users across the world. “I don’t think any other app in India is doing what Finma is offering. All of it happens in the background. All the charts animate smoothly, and the interactions are fluid. A crucial feature of the app is privacy, ensuring everything remains on the device. It’s one of the reasons why Finma is exclusively available on the Apple platform. No other OS comes close to enabling this level of polish.”
