Bangalore, Home of the Next Angry Birds

The entrance to MoFirst Solutions is not far from the trash piles and stray dogs of one of Mumbai’s many slums. Inside, it looks like the offices of any of India’s other programmer-for-hire companies, part of the country’s $88.1 billion a year information technology services and outsourcing industry. Two dozen workers sit shoulder to shoulder, with no air conditioning, coding on laptops. The main difference? They’re building iPhone apps.

While IT services still dominate the nation’s technology industry, companies such as MoFirst are tapping India’s next wave in outsourcing, with thousands of programmers hired in recent years to capitalize on the demand for building programs for Apple’s iPhone and iPad and devices running Google’s Android software. Mobile-app outsourcing may be a $5.6 billion annual business by 2015, according to estimates from Forrester Research, and if history is any indicator, much of that will head to the subcontinent. “India is a logical place to do it for the same reason the software and services model has worked here: lower cost,” says Anshul Gupta, an analyst at research firm Gartner in Mumbai.