The iTunes App Store and Google Play now offer more than 600,000 apps each. And Apple’s most recent earnings call revealed that the company has paid out more than $5.5 billion to developers since the launch of the App Store. With unprecedented consumer adoption of iOS and Android devices, low barriers to entry for developers and throngs of paying customers, Apple and Google have created massive economic opportunities for developers.
Flurry Blog
This report follows up on another released by Flurry earlier this month, showing that Apple continues to hold a strong lead over Google’s Android for developer support.
This month, the world’s two largest mobile app platform providers, Apple and Google, enter what is arguably the most critical month of the year for each company, when each hosts their annual developer conference, the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) and Google I/O. While engaged in a multi-year platform war, their success largely depends on innovation provided for their platforms by the third party developer community.
This report reveals emerging trends in mobile app category usage. By studying how consumer time is shifting across app categories, we see where consumers are spending an increasing amount of time in apps beyond Games and Social Networking to show what’s next in mobile app popularity.
In this report, Flurry focuses on the rise of the Social Networking category in mobile apps. Let’s start by looking at where consumers spend their time by application category.
This chart derived from Flurry data compares revenue generated per user across iOS, Amazon and Android app stores.
Flurry recently quantified China’s meteoric adoption of iOS and Android applications. While China ranked 10th in application sessions at the beginning of 2011, it finished the year in 2nd place, only behind the United States. With its large population and rapidly emerging middle class, adoption of apps vaulted China into the position of world’s 2nd largest app economy.
In this report, Flurry compares traditional versus independent game companies in the new mobile app marketplace.
Smartphones and tablets continue to break new consumer technology adoption records. From earlier research, Flurry found that iOS and Android smart devices have experienced twice the uptake rate compared to that of Internet adoption, and four times the rate compared to that of PC adoption. Following this unprecedented adoption, advertising dollars are beginning to flow into mobile.
The Super Bowl is an American phenomenon, now largely considered a de facto American holiday. As a premier media event, it regularly attracts record-breaking audiences. This year, Super Bowl XLVI became the most watched television program in history, drawing an audience of 111 million viewers according to The Nielsen Company. Prior to this, the record was held by last year’s Super Bowl, which itself had overtaken the number one spot held for twenty-eight years by the final episode of M*A*S*H.
In just two years, tablet computing has gained unprecedented traction. According to research firm Strategy Analytics, global tablet shipments more than doubled during the last three months of 2011, rising to 26.8 units, up from 10.7 million a year earlier.
Last summer, Flurry published a report detailing how the average smartphone user began spending more time in their mobile applications than they do browsing the web. Updating the analysis, Flurry finds the usage gap continues to widen.
For this report, Flurry leverages its data-set from over 140,000 apps running on the significant majority of iOS and Android devices.
With record-breaking mobile growth for both Apple and Google this year, Flurry has been anticipating an equally record-breaking Christmas.
As 2011 comes to a close and we look forward to 2012, we size today’s installed base of iOS and Android smart devices (smartphones and tablets) as well as identify markets where the most future upside exists.