Mobile App Growth Continues To Go Boom!
All those new folk joining the smartphone cool gang are also driving app growth, so says analytics company Flurry.
Flurry provides developers with tools to measure how people are using their apps. At MobileBeat 2013 in early July, the company revealed its take on “the state of the apposphere” worldwide.
Flurry chief product officer Prashant Fuloria said the company currently tracks 300,000 apps from 100,000 developers worldwide. Due to this reach, Flurry crunches data from more than 3 billion app “events” daily – that’s 1.3 trillion different in-app events each month.
According to Flurry, the rapid growth in their app usage data is mirrored by the broader mobile market.
“We’re seeing a tremendous disruption by mobile,” Fuloria told MobileBeat. People continue to move from traditional web to mobile devices, and there remains huge growth potential.
In China, for example, there are now 240 million smartphones and tablets in use – a mere quarter of the population. Meanwhile, India’s smart device users match that of Canada, but the former has 36X the population.
Flurry found that apps across a number of categories, including productivity, games, lifestyle and social networking, are driving usage. What’s more, it appears app consumption occurs 24-7.
“Some people never sleep,” Fuloria said.
Fuloria encouraged app developers not to overlook moms as an important demographic. They use a variety of apps, including games. In fact, moms with Android phones spent 53% of their app time gaming.
In comparison, iPad moms clocked 48% of their app usage playing games, while iPhone mommas played app games 31% of the time.
In a panel discussion following Flurry’s presentation participants agreed that, due to the rapid growth of mobile app usage, there were a number of challenges that to-date had gone unresolved.
Josh Williams, president and chief science officer of Kontagent, told the crowd: “There are a lot of pain points for developers, and for existing businesses.”
He highlighted the need for consistency across mobile advertising delivery – saying that a truly effective mobile ad format was yet to be discovered.
Tapjoy chief product officer Jeff Drobick backed Williams’ point, highlighting the disparity between the $40 billion spent on web advertising annually, of which only $4 billion is devoted to mobile ads.
“We haven’t built the killer ad format for mobile yet,” Fuloria agreed.
Damien Zamora CEO of GoMobile Solutions commented: “I’ve been saying this for years, the mobile revolution is not ending anytime soon. You have to get mobile to compete.”
