Mobile industry in Russia is quite young and is just starting to take shape. However, the market overall is on the verge of active growth and it’s time to go mobile with your business.
App Annie analytics provided detailed research on global mobile market that gives an overall impression on growth tendencies and path of development.
Full research you can find on their website, but for those who have no time to read long texts, we created a summary of main trends mentioned in the report.
Growth of mobile applications market
Last year the market of mobile apps continued to grow and develop. Global downloads of mobile apps grew by 15%, while time, spent in apps, grew by 25%. Key factor there is the growth of profit. App Store and Google Play developers received 40% more profit from their apps in the stores during the last 2016 year.
In 2016 China became the absolute master of iOS App Store profits. Other developing markets also proceed with great growth indicators. Games are still the main source of profit, Pokemon GO, for instance, achieved the maximum results in this area. On last week of 2016 the game still was in Top-5 of the most profitable global apps, no matter its launch happened in July 2016. In December one more hit emerged, it’s Super Mario Run game that became #1 in 148 countries. More than 5% of the users have already bought the paid version of the game after the initial free install.
In 2016 the mobile shopping also grew. France, Germany and UK were the leaders in growing number of session in mobile commerce apps.
Users are still spending most of their time on social apps and messengers. Still, great number of other categories also became noticeable. For example, the usage of apps for fitness and healthy living, such as Sportlife Club app, increased enormously.
One of the most important metrics of 2016 is the average usage of apps among iPhone users. Generally, people use from 30 to 40 apps per month.
In 2017, according to current trends, new mobile records will be established for mobile apps ecosystem.
The growth of business apps is finally happening!
For years analytics and growth hackers all over the world say that mobile apps will change its’ vector from games to business applications. And finally this prognosis comes tr
Both main app stores are grew in terms of business apps over the year. More and more users adapt to the idea that all important things they needs can be found in mobile apps, whether it’s calling a doctor to your home or just finding out the new route for their bike ride. in iOS App Store the most growing categories are Finance, Travel and Photo and Video, in Google Play such categories as Tools, Social and Management are leading the way. Still, the games are winning the battle in terms of profits.
In 2016 games give 75% and 90% of profit to App Store and Google Play accordingly. Half of the App Store market share depended on Role-play games in 2016.
App Store is an absolute leader in terms of payments in apps
In 2016 developers for both App Store and Google Play received 35 mlrd USD of profit. As the matter of fact, annual growth in terms of payments was 40%, that was way more than in 2015. Together with growth in installs the profit growth happened thanks to China that alone gave more than a half of the annual profit to the stores.
Mutual time users spent in apps is growing together with profits on all three markets. This is great news to well-known apps and to young promising ones too. In the end such results confirm that growth of installs is a great base for future payments and profit from usage.
New approach towards well-known spheres
Users are ready to pay for their subscriptions through mobile apps. For example, the profits of mobile streaming services have risen enormously in 2016. Even while users have options how to pay outside of the actual store (e.g. with bank card on the streaming website) they prefer to use mobile payments due to its comfort.
Youtube became a leader of streaming services in USA and UK in terms of user numbers, but Netflix was the most profitable one in both stores due to its’ mobile subscription option.
The growth of mobile retail
Mobile commerce is growing rapidly all over the world. In fact, in 2016 44% of whole retail internet traffic and 31% of sales was happening in mobile area. We can forecast that these numbers will continue to grow with people getting used to mobile shopping options and spending more and more time in such apps.
Traditional retailers and outlets need to invest into strategic mobile development in order to preserve their competitive advantages in mobile world. Even such services and aggregators that are dealing with retail, e.g. various delivery services, prefer to develop their own mobile projects.
One of the most recent mobile trends is holiday shopping going mobile. During holidays sales from Black Friday to Cyber Monday the profits grew way beyond the numbers from the previous year. The main achievement so far is that USA mobile sales for the first time exceed 1 mlrd USD during Black Friday 2016. In such countries as China, India and South Korea the number of apps installed and the number of purchases made with is also constantly growing.
Social apps for marketing goals
World top social apps have great loyal audiences. Still, the question is how to transform this advantage into profit, remains. In 2016 we saw many attempts to answer this question. Twitter may be the most unsuccessful example. This company tries to monetize its’ platform for the long period of time with no actual success. All successful cases state that you need to add marketing tools into your social apps.
Instagram has launched Instagram Stories in August together with package of simple advert and analysis tools. From September to December Instagram share in advertisement via Facebook network on the iPhone grew more than 50%.
Snapchat, that inspired Instagram Stories in the first place, remastered its’ Discover feature, and integrated developers content into Snapchat Stories even more. Such feature supposed to increase the number of users seeing this content. Pinterest also supported new trend and redesign its’ targeting options similar to individual target audiences that Facebook has.
Bank sphere innovations
Retail mobile banking in Europe is also growing. In France, UK and Germany the number of sessions in retail banking apps increased significantly. As in USA, main users of such apps are Millennials.
Total growth in sessions numbers happened due to increase of user database and number of sessions per user.
Mobile games industry is changing
Pokémon GO will stay in our minds as the brightest app of 2016, for sure. This game gained success and attract great number of non gamers to play. Easy game mechanisms, VR gameplay, social functions of the game and the main idea based on well-known and lovable characters made it possible.
Game metrics grew dramatically — in 110 days after the launch users spent more than 800 millions of dollars in game. It’s faster than some of the most successful mobile games in the whole history of industry grew. Overall, 2016 showed that original ideas in terms of gameplay is a promising field for mobile games of the future.
To conclude, mobile sphere is developing into several directions at the same time. This is great thing that is happening due to great investments into mobile industry and overall inspiration to stay with mobile features instead of common general web ones.