App Economy Is Doing Well According To Flurry

We talk a lot about the app market and mobile industry here at Kumulos (Backend as a Service), and we’ve more than once talked about how in terms of devices, the mobile sector is still going very strong. Across the board sales of smart-devices have been increasing, and there will be an estimated 1 Billion smartphones shipped in 2013 alone around the globe. The IT sector in general has been doing very well, with steady, if not stunning, growth across the last few years.

But what app the actual app economy?

(UPDATE 2017: Here’s an interesting comparison on the state of the market in 2016 from the good folks at Waracle.)

After all, it was apps that made the original iPhone the success it was, and they are what continues to drive the mobile industry’s push. And yet we more rarely hear about just whether app developers should be happy or concerned.

Well, with a study just released by app and mobile data analysts Flurry, it seems that app developers can rest easy, the app economy is only growing.

Time-spent-on-smartphones-kumulos-backend-as-a-service

As you can see, when all the separate bits and pieces are put together, apps vastly outweigh browsers on smart devices as the most used software. That 80% is of the average time (2 hours and 38 minutes apparently) spent on a smart mobile device, which is a sizeable chunk of a user’s day spent inside the appiverse (is that a word? Should it be?).  By comparison only 20% (or 31 minutes a day) were actually spent inside a mobile browser.

Game apps continue to be the biggest apps in the industry, claiming a hefty 32% of the users time and in a statistic that will surprise no one Facebook has the next highest usage numbers with 18% of users time spent in the social network. Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf has wondered in the Flurry blog whether Facebook is also turning into the users browser of choice. As so many things are now linked through Facebook it is quickly becoming a hotbed for mobile browsing without ever leaving the Facebook app. “We can assert that Facebook has become the most adopted browser in terms of consumer time spent” he said, also adding that Mobile has “become Facebook’s biggest opportunity”

On top of this Flurry has found that daily app launching numbers, at least in the US, have increased year by year. In 2010 Q4 the daily app launch number was 7.2, in Q4 2011 it was 7.5 and in Q4 2012 it was 7.9.

To anyone paying attention, those numbers point to the fear slowdown of the app business being, at least for now, unfounded. In fact we appear to still be growing year on year, and that’s an incredibly positive thing to know for app developers everywhere.

Why?

Because it means you can keep making great apps!

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