Singapore – Flurry Analytics, part of the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite, announced its annual global mobile and application usage study. In its eighth year, the study offers interesting insights on global mobile app usage and trends from the last year on over 2.1 billion smart devices and 3.2 trillion sessions. Throughout 2016, which was also the last year of the first decade for mobile apps, the industry managed to squeak-out another 365 days of growth. Mobile Growth Hits Critical Mass: Usage Up 11%
“Over the last year, the Flurry footprint grew to track more than 940,000 applications, across 2.1 billion devices, in 3.2 trillion sessions. In this context, we define app usage as a user opening an app and recording what we call a “session,” as well as the amount of time spent in the application.” said Simon Khalaf, SVP, Yahoo. He added, “Compared to the year prior, overall app usage grew by 11% and time-spent in apps grew by 69%. In previous years, we saw all app categories growing in tandem; however, this year the story is different. After shifting the web and television to the rearview mirror, mobile apps started eating their own, with session and time-spent growth in some app categories occurring at the expense of others..”
Time spent in Social and Messaging apps grew by an astounding 394% over the last year, proving to be the driver that helped mobile achieves its year-over-year time-spent growth of 69%. This is a result of consumers using their social and messaging apps as their voice and video calling utilities, as well as the phenomenon we call Communitainment. Business and Finance (up 43% in time-spent) and Sports (up 25% in time-spent) categories were immune to growth decay because they are intrinsically centered around mobile activities and rely on real time data.
It was hard to miss the disappointing post-holiday news from major retailers. However, the story is quite different in the mobile retail world. Shopping apps grew 31% in time-spent. A report by Adobe shows a very healthy growth in online sales, with Amazon grabbing 38% of holiday sales transactions from November 1 through December 29, 2016. This growth significantly benefited from mobile and its apps, which, unlike the desktop, have captured impulse buys.
“As the iPhone celebrates its first decade, the mobile industry has grown into a dog-eat-dog world. The decelerating rate of growth could signal market maturity, saturation or simply the end of the app gold rush. But let us put things in perspective. The gold rush in California ended in 1855. A lot of wealth has been generated since then. We are excited to see what app developers do in the next decade and which industry they chose to disrupt, again. Whatever it is, we will be by their side, providing a bit more than picks and shovels.” added Khalaf.
