Goole is rolling out a training program targeted at India’s budding developer market.

Through skilling program Google is ensuring that app development in India focuses on supporting its Android mobile platform. Android controls around 90% of the India mobile market.

India is expected to be home to around four million application developers by 2018, becoming the largest population of developers in the world. But today, less than 25% of these developers are trained to develop and build for the mobile platform. The majority of India’s Internet user base today access the Internet from their mobile phones and almost all the future Internet users in India and many of the world’s emerging countries will be mobile only. There is a huge opportunity for India to become a global leader in mobile app development and we want to contribute and bridge the skills gap that exists today, google said in the blog.

Caesar Sengupta, VP products at Google, said "But most of these developers still work to create desktop applications even when the users are on mobile platforms. Only 4 per cent of apps out of 1000 top apps on Google Play store have been created by Indian developers. We want to change that with the Android Skilling Programme," he said in New Delhi.

We are excited to announce the launch of the Android Skilling program. Aimed at training two million developers in India over the next three years and in support of the Skill India initiative of the Indian government, we hope to provide easy and affordable access to a world-class skilling and educational program for Indian developers, The key elements of this initiative are:

  • End-to-end Android training
  • Training Channels
  • Associate Android Developer Certification

Google is rolling a partner program to support its objective and a recognised accreditation for developers who complete training called Associate Android Developer Certification which is a performance-based exam

"In addition to partnering with the National Skill Development Corporation of India, we have teamed up with training partners like Edureka, Koenig, Manipal Global, Simplilearn, Udacity and UpGrad who will operate as Authorized Android Training Partners in India," said Lubbers. "We are working closely with them to train their trainers and to update their Android courseware to prepare their students for the Android Certification and a career in Android development."