The state of the world’s app market is not just healthy, it is robust. The digital market continues to show signs of development and growth with 2015 posting a 58% increase in overall app usage globally and registering 3.2 trillion sessions.
That figure comes from Flurry, Yahoo’s app analytics arm, which released data on how apps (by category) fared over previous year. According to its findings, personalization, news and magazines and productivity apps saw record triple-digit growth and all categories saw growth with the exception of games, which declined by 1%.
Most of the global growth rate was due to phablets, which Flurry anticipates will overtake the mobile market by 2017. According to its predictions, phablets, which made up 29% of the mobile market by the fourth quarter of 2015, behind medium-sized phones, will dominate the market with a 59% share by the second quarter of 2017.
Flurry data shows that the increase in year-over-year growth per category far over-indexes when looking at which devices were used for consumption. For instance, news and magazines apps witnessed a 721% increase in consumption on phablets, compared with 135% increase on other devices. Similarly, sports apps saw a 274% growth in phablet-based sessions and a 53% growth on all other devices.
Overall, phablets registered a 334% growth rate while medium-sized phones and small tablets grew by 85% and 81% respectively.
Santa Claus also bought into the phablet trend, with 27% of all new devices activated post Christmas being phablets.
Overall app growth reduced when compared with growth in 2014 when the app market posted a 76% increase in usage. Flurry’s data shows that 40% of the 58% increase, however comes from existing app users. This shows deeper engagement than in 2014 when 20% of the 76% growth in app usage was attributable to existing users.
The front runner in the app growth space were personalization apps like emoji apps like Kim Kardashian’s Kimoji app, which collectively registered a 344% increase in sessions. Other persoanlization apps that fared well include Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Line and Snapchat.
News and magazines registered a 141% increase in sessions, productivity apps (think Google Docs, Slack, etc) saw a 119% jump in sessions usage, while lifestyle and shopping apps grew 80% compared to their 174% growth in 2014). Mobile commerce accounts for 40% of global online sales but is still lagging behind in Canada.
In its January 2014 forecast report titled Technology Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Predictions, Deloitte predicted that phablets sales would go up 100% in 2013 from the previous year and account for 25% of smartphone sales that year.
Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock
