Latest news with #LightX
Indian Express
22-05-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Ahead of WWDC: How Swiggy, LightX, and others are tapping into Apple Intelligence framework
Widely perceived as having fallen behind in the high-stakes AI race, Apple is expected to make a fresh bid to catch up with competitors at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) slated from June 9 to June 13. The iPhone-maker's AI reboot includes letting third-party developers build on top of its smaller, in-house AI models, according to a report by Bloomberg. The new framework will also let developers integrate its flagship AI offering, Apple Intelligence, across their apps. While Apple looks to ramp up its AI push to win over users, major Indian developers have said that they are already collaborating with the tech giant to integrate existing Apple Intelligence features in the application layer. Online food delivery platform Swiggy has said it relies on Apple's machine learning-based Translation API that was announced in iOS 18 last year. 'Apple's in-app translations let you translate from English to any language without using any third-party libraries. So, for our food menu, which is very textual, we used Apple's APIs to translate those text to Hindi language,' Agam Mahajan, iOS developer and engineering lead at Swiggy, told at a recent virtual developer showcase organised by Apple. Mahajan also revealed that Swiggy Instamart leveraged Apple's Vision frameworks to develop its popular Shopping List feature that lets users upload their handwritten shopping lists to create a cart with those items on the app. Swiggy has also developed a new feature (in beta) around Apple's Image Playground API. This feature lets users prompt for AI-generated images to be used as the profile picture for their accounts. 'We are also using Siri intents so that the search on Siri can be more personalised to the end consumer,' Mahajan said. Beyond e-commerce, Apple is also enabling Indian developers to roll out AI-focused content creation tools. LightX is one such graphic design and image editing app developed by Noida-based AndOr Communications. 'We currently have 7.55 million downloads globally and we have a 4.7 rating based on 1,38,000 users' experiences,' said Sharad Shankar, the founder and CEO of AndOr Communications. In 2024, India emerged as the largest market for AI app downloads, contributing 21 per cent of total downloads globally, according to data provided by SensorTower. Eight out of the ten highest grossing graphic design apps on the App Store in India have AI in the name, which is indicative of the surging popularity of AI-based creative apps. 'When we started our company around December 2015 as AndOr, we realised that smartphones are getting more and more powerful, and we wanted to build something similar to Photoshop. We also realised that people are going to create more content through their smartphones. That is why we developed LightX,' Shankar, an IIT Kanpur graduate, told LightX provides users with a suite of tools for graphic design as well as photo editing and video editing. When it was first rolled out, LightX was a paid app that was priced differently in different territories. It saw nearly 1.2 million downloads and with a 4.7 rating, LightX was ranked at the 16th spot in the App Store in the US and at the 17th spot in a few European countries as well. However, the company has since pivoted to a subscription-based business model as it was no longer 'financially viable for us to keep building features just for $3 or so,' as per Shankar. It has also moved beyond offering common photo editing tasks like crop, resize, image cleanup, and touch-up. 'We have started investing more and more energy towards building AI tools. We now have a suite of AI offerings where users can take a picture of a person, change the outfit or hairstyle of the person, and even create a professional-looking headshot,' Shankar said, adding that users can also create AI-generated, Ghibli style animated images and cartoon caricatures using the app. It is also working on a semantic photo editor, where users can dictate changes to photos. Its graphic design solutions have also been revamped to be more AI-oriented, providing AI-generated birthday cards, for example. Citing the high cost of building foundational models, Shankar revealed that LightX is built on top of open-source AI models like Stability Diffusion whose outputs are fine tuned based on user requirements. He added that LightX utilises Apple's core graphics engine and vision libraries in order to enhance its creative AI features by detecting faces, recognising poses, and removing the background from images. The App Store has also been a great facilitator for us, Shankar said, especially when it comes to featuring us for different events like Holi and Diwali in India. In terms of guardrails, LightX has a backend filter which disallows any kind of NSFW content. 'If there is any amount of nudity that we find in photos, we completely block it and we relay an error message. That is kind of very strict because we have constant guidelines from Apple as well as Google. They don't allow you to generate such content,' Shankar said. When asked if the AI-modified images on LightX carry any labels, invisible watermarks, or hidden identifiers in the metadata, Shankar said that they would be happy to undertake such provenance efforts if there was some kind of regulation that demanded it.
Hindustan Times
28-04-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
We're committed to investing in the success of Indian developers: Tim Cook
Drawing from a first of its kind study specifically for the Indian market, Apple has published data from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad which indicates that Apple's App Store ecosystem in India facilitated ₹44,447 crores ($5.31 billion) in developer billings and sales in 2024. More importantly, the data indicates that more than 94% of that commerce accrued solely to developers and businesses, without any commission paid to Apple. The company also suggests that global earnings of India-based developers have tripled. 'The App Store has been an economic miracle for developers in India and all around the world, and we're thrilled to support their work,' says Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. 'This study underlines the power of India's incredibly vibrant app economy. And we're committed to keep investing in the success of developers of all sizes as they build apps that make an important impact and enrich people's lives.' The study led by Professor Viswanath Pingali breaks down the billing specifics — App Store's India-based developers generated ₹38,906 crores ($4.65 billion) in total billings and sales from the sale of physical goods and services, ₹3,014 crores ($352.9 million) from in-app advertising, and ₹2,527 crores ($302 million) from digital goods and services. 'The App Store's global platform offers India-based developers the opportunity to distribute their apps to over a billion customers worldwide across the App Store's 175 storefronts. India-based developers have taken advantage of this opportunity, successfully reaching a global audience,' notes Professor Pingali, in the study. As many as 87% of developers, clocked downloads from multiple storefronts (27 on average in 2024), and 43% of the 755 million app downloads came from users outside of India. As much as 79% of App Store earnings of India-based developers came from users outside of India. Apple says many apps from India-based developers have appeared on the most-downloaded app charts in storefronts outside of India, and apps from India-based developers were in the top 100 most-downloaded apps in 70 storefronts outside of India. Some apps from India-based developers that are proving to be popular worldwide include Kiddopia (an app focused on developing basic language, motor, and social skills in preschoolers), LightX (an AI-powered photo and video editing app) and GameBerry Labs (developer of app-based classic board games, including Ludo STAR and Parchisi STAR). The study also notes Swiggy, Chaupal, Porter, Urban Company and Lumy as apps that have seen significant downloads. Between 2019 and 2024, the Finance apps category has clocked an 11x growth for India-based app developers, followed by Health & Fitness a well as Lifestyle (7x each), Utilities (6x) and Games (5x). 'Compared to five years ago, downloads from iOS users in India have more than tripled and earnings from users in India increased more than fivefold,' the report adds. Apple's push for India's developer ecosystem The Apple Developer Center in Bengaluru has been key to growing a developer and app ecosystem for the App Store. Apple engineers work with developers from across India, in an attempt to help then draw an advantage from focused tools, including 250,000 APIs (or Application Programming Interface, or a software interface between more than one app) that are part of frameworks such as HealthKit, Metal, and Core ML. Apple says that between 2020 through 2023, various mechanisms in place helped prevent more than $7 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions. The App Store policies dictating privacy, security, and quality standards, also led to the rejection of more than 1.7 million app submissions. In previous years, Apple has thickened the data privacy layer for users. The addition of App Tracking Transparency in iOS, as well as the and Privacy Nutrition Labels for apps listed on the App Store, are some examples. How is Google Play placed, in comparison? The last time Google released Play ecosystem data for India was for 2023 (the antitrust investigations may be a reason for the lack of a 2024 data set). At the time, the tech giant insisted that the Google Play ecosystem in India had helped in generating ₹4,300 crore in revenue for Indian developers in 2023. India, was then the second-largest developer community on Google Play. Google has since had to update its billing policies in India following a Competition Commission of India (CCI) investigation regarding anti-competitive practices. Early last year, Google enabled alternate billing methods for developers, which reduces the share of each sale they would otherwise have had to send Google's way (for this method, it is now at 4%), if they'd remained on the Play billing system. Apple too is facing similar anti-trust investigations, with the CCI having noted Apple late last year for using its dominant position to limit alternative options for developers, users, and third-party payment processing companies. This includes prohibiting third-party app stores that would compete with the App Store, on its devices, and mandatory use of in-app purchases with links with a fee for each transaction. Any final ruling is awaited. At this time, many developers including Netflix and Spotify, do not offer in-app payment for subscriptions, on iOS and Android.
