Summary of this article
A new India Digital Behaviour Report 2025-26 by VTION and IAMAI shows women in urban India spend more time on high-intent e-commerce and quick commerce apps.
The study highlights a surge in AI app usage and shifting search behaviour.
It highlights UPI adoption as infrastructure reshaping digital payments and online consumption patterns.
The growth in the digital ecosystem in India has brought several behavioural shifts among people. Also, the digital landscape in India is changing fast and constantly reshaping the digital and app ecosystem, according to the recent India Digital Behaviour Report 2025-26 released by the behavioral intelligence platform VTION and the Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), in May 2026. The report collected data from a panel of over 100,000 consented smartphones representing 407 million urban Indians.
Findings revealed that demographics, geography, and gender are influencing the different buying modes and attention economies across the digital landscape and quick commerce ecosystem in India.
Female Engagement Growing More Than That Of Men
The report revealed that women scored higher on the parameter of digital attention over men. The report focused on time spent as the true measure of deep engagement, and found that in urban India’s higher intent categories, women were outperforming men.
According to the report, women spent up to 47 per cent more time than men across high-intent categories, such as e-commerce and quick commerce. In mega cities, women in the age group of 25-34 spent an average of 35.2 minutes per day on commerce apps, compared to 24.8 minutes spent by their male counterparts. Female engagement was higher in entertainment, with an average of 82.4 minutes per day, with the highest peaking at 86.3 minutes for 25-34 year age bracket.
The report said that any marketing brief for e-commerce was likely to mis-aim if it lacked a female-first approach.
AI Revolution And Change In Search Behaviour
The report said that the most explosive growth was in the AI app category, which witnessed over 100 per cent surge in Monthly Active Users (MAU) between April 2025 and March 2026.
AI was found to be rapidly forming a new daily habit among the new consumer classification system (NCCS) A category, in the 18-34 age group in North Urban India.
According to the report, consumers were increasingly asking questions to AI before opening an e-commerce app. This showed the change from the traditional search and social feeds to AI-based consideration suggestions. It revealed that ChatGPT continued to dominate the sector with a 70.80 per cent category share as of March 2026. Gemini and Perplexity recorded the fastest percentage growth from smaller bases.
E-Commerce Vs Q-Commerce
The report also drew the distinction between e-commerce and quick (Q) commerce. They are two completely different buying modes. For instance, Meesho and Myntra are e-commerce platforms that command around 15-20 minutes of browsing time driven by aspiration, whereas Q-commerce apps like Blinkit and Zepto provide delivery within 10 minutes, reflecting need fulfilment and high-frequency behaviour.
UPI Adoption
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become a utility infrastructure now, recording 241.6 billion annual transactions in FY2025-26. This indicated a 30 per cent increase over one year. UPI now accounts for around 84 per cent of all digital payment volumes in India.
The Demographic Map
According to the report, urban India’s attention was highly age-dependent. The 18-24 age group remained on top in using social media, averaging over 120 minutes per day. This is 23 per cent higher than the category average. However, for the entertainment category specifically, consumers over 35 years ranked higher with spending around 77-78 minutes daily on OTT and related platforms.
The report further said that geography played a role in engagement depth. The North and East zones showed the highest engagement in entertainment and AI apps, whereas the South followed in AI adoption and depth in entertainment sessions.
