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So naturally, we’re starting to see a lot of misguided spinoffs of these top 200 ultra successful apps. The App Store Is Oversaturated with Unoriginality This is likely due to the fact that games tend to spike in popularity and then decline, while apps from publishers like Facebook and Google are more here to stay. It’s also important to note that there were no games in the top 25%, despite the fact that 59% of apps downloaded are games, compared to 21% for communication, 9% for entertainment, and 6% for mobile commerce. We also found that Google was the top publisher, occupying spaces 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 16. For context, Facebook had around 1.1 billion mobile users worldwide at the time. Being that there were 160 million total app users in the US at the time of the study, that’s an impressive 72% penetration rate. Facebook was by far the top app, with 115.4 million unique monthly visitors. We especially saw this in one of comScore’s follow-up studies, where they looked at the top 25 mobile apps in America (by unique visitors).
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200 Apps Dominate the Entire MarketĪccording to Nielsen, 70% of total US smartphone app usage is accounted for by the top 200 apps in the marketplace. And the list of apps that they are using is short. So people are using apps, but they aren’t downloading them. But perhaps most shockingly, we’re finding that the overwhelming amount of app usage time is actually being spent on a very select number of apps. Another issue that’s been raised is that Apple’s app store doesn’t allow for much discoverability, causing many frustrated users to ditch the sub-par search functionalities and resort to downloading from “top 25” lists instead. Yet at the same time, users are indicating that they just don’t want that many apps, especially if they don’t solve an explicit problem. In it’s current state, the marketplace is rather saturated with apps for just about every possible function. Seems like apps are all the rage, right?Īctually, as we begin to dig deeper into the data behind app consumption, we start to find that the app market isn’t quite what it seems to be.
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US users on average have twice as many apps today as they did in 2013, with an average of 42 apps on smartphones and 35 on tablets. In fact, 7 out of every 8 minutes of media consumption on mobile devices is spent via apps. The app market has grown exponentially over the course of the last couple years, with apps now representing 52% of the time that people spend with digital media. Truthfully, this data actually seems kind of counter-intuitive at first glance.