How Bharat Redefined Digital Friendships in 2025

FRND, India’s first avatar-based audio social discovery platform, the marquee product of Interact Group, today unveiled its ‘Year in Conversations 2025’ study, capturing the digital behaviour of Bharat. With a staggering 92% of all engagement now coming from outside Tier 1 regions, this study highlights a clear cultural shift; India’s Tier 2 & 3 towns are driving the country’s most meaningful and emotional digital friendships.

From Ernakulam (Kerala) in the south to Anantnag (J&K) in the north and Jamnagar (Gujarat) in the west, users engaged heavily in voice-led companionship, weekend video conversations, and regionally expressive interactions, shaping India’s emerging digital behaviour patterns. Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai led India’s conversation map with the most active users, while Andhra Pradesh users talked the longest.

Key Highlights:

• Bharat users recorded 285 million+ conversations, spending 418 million minutes together on the FRND app.
• Users from Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra recorded the highest number of conversations in the year.
• Rose and Chai were the most popular virtual gifts. A total of 974 million virtual gifts were sent in 2025.
• Remote & small towns dominated FRND’s growth, with 95% of new users joining from non-metro/remote regions with 79% coming via mid and entry-level devices.
• Weekends drove a deeper connection: every Saturday, FRND saw an 8% surge in video calls, with Diwali marking the highest single-day video usage at 4.04 lakh conversations.

The 2025 data paints a powerful picture of India’s changing digital identity, one that is voice-first, emotional, and rooted in regional expression. With 95% of new users coming from non-metros and thousands joining from the US, UK, Malaysia, and Australia, FRND is becoming a global yet deeply Bharat-led space for genuine companionship. The  longest call on the platform was for 1247 mins that roughly calculates to 20.3 hrs!

Users are not chasing curated feeds; they are seeking emotional safety, empathy, inclusion and community through voice, a shift that places India’s heartlands at the centre of the country’s social digital evolution. In 2025 alone, 201 million new connections were made.

Bhanu Pratap Singh Tanwar, Co-founder & CEO, Interact Group, said, “India’s digital engagement patterns are undergoing a meaningful shift, with young users increasingly choosing direct, safe and intentional conversations over passive content consumption. The ‘Year in Conversations 2025’ study shows that this change is being led not by metropolitan cities, but by strong and sustained growth from Tier 2 -4 towns, where our community is actively shaping new social norms online. One of our standout features is the built-in pseudo anonymity that enables safety and also ensures genuine conversations, reflecting how young Indians are nurturing connections in an empathetic, comfortable space and at FRND, we’re proud to be enabling this social evolution.”

The FRND ‘Year in Conversations 2025’ study is based on anonymized, aggregated data of 6.9 million users, analysing user behaviour, regional trends, and engagement patterns across FRND’s audio, video, and interactive features.