The latest App Annie report, detailing mobile usage trends about which apps were heavily used during the year, shares some interesting data on how things have moved over the past 12 months.
The entity has released its State of Mobile 2020 report and it goes without saying that our focus has been to cull out data pertaining to the Indian market. This includes trends like which apps have been a hit with Indian users and is India the go-to hub for growth in this space.
The report looks at apps across different segments; gaming, finance (payment), social media and video streaming among others. Here’s everything you would want to know about the latest mobile trends shared via the report.
Mobile Usage on the Rise, More Users Paying for Games
App stores saw a record 204 billion app downloads in 2019, the report highlights.
As you can see here, China leads the segment where users are paying for in-game purchases. This has been possible with the popularity of apps like PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty among others. That’s why it’s hardly surprising to see that 72 percent of all the money spent on app stores belongs to the gaming category.
Having said that, the report does suggest there has been decent growth in spending on subscribing to non-gaming apps as well. It has grown from 18 percent in 2016 to 28 percent in 2019.
All this can be attributed to an increase in usage time on mobile, which has globally increased by 35 percent in 2019, and in India 25 percent more time was spent by the users in 2019.
What the Report Says About India
Ever since demonetisation came as a jolt to the fortunes of businesses in India, people have been forced to look at using mobile-based payment apps, which is now offered by players like Paytm, PhonePe and Google among others.
And even though cash continues to be the go-to mode of making transactions, the usage time of payment apps has been steadily increasing since 2017.
The report emphasises on that reality, as more than 100 billion sessions were recorded on these apps in 2019. This was an increase of more than 40 billion sessions from 2018. It mentions Google Pay was the leading payment app player in the country last year, with over 36 million new downloads added.
In addition to this, Indian mobile users have recorded a staggering 80 percent growth in sessions on entertainment apps like Hotstar, Netflix from 2017 to 2019. This growth can be credited to cheapest data rates in the world, made available to users by all telecom operators in the country.
Now let’s take a look at the top apps across various segments in India for the year 2019.
It’s official now, TikTok had a rocking 2019 in India, with growth of the platform surpassing every other in its segment, including the Facebook-owned apps. In fact, TikTok’s India growth is much higher than all its markets combined and interestingly, most of this growth spike is from December 2018 onwards.
The other two are surprising additions. You’ve got Helo and a lesser known Hago app.
While the former is famous for supporting up to 14 Indian languages and caters to users in varied regions of the country, Hago is sort of a ‘play and chat’ platform, allowing people the chance to make friends, and it claims to have 100 million downloads.
MX Player is a free video-streaming app, which offers in-house production content in India, as well as provide access to content from other platforms.
But that’s not all, the app can be used to play all kinds of video formats using its offline video player, and this is most likely to have caught the eyes of Indian mobile users. Its listing on the Play Store claims it has been download over 500,000,000 times, but not sure about its exact user count.
The other two are Hotstar and Netflix, and everybody is familiar with what these two bring to the table.
Next up is the payment app segment, and there are some strange mentions in this list. While Google Pay leads the segment, the ones following it are CashBean and KreditBee.
After going through the app and its details, it became clear that users downloading this app were able to get quick loans without the hassle of going through paperwork submission. Is it the lure of easy money here?
The top two of the e-commerce segment in India lead the list of apps in the retail category of the report as well. While Amazon leads the race, with Flipkart coming second, Paytm is the third player which has managed to find its feet across different verticals.
And finally, it’s time to look at the popular games in the country among mobile users in 2019. But hang on, it’s not PUBG Mobile that leads the chart according to the report. Instead, you have Carrom Pool at the top and Free Fire in the second position.
Popular Apps Across the World in 2019
Now that we’ve looked at the data trends for India, here’s a list of popular apps across the world.
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