Posted by Peter Farago on Fri, Jan 27, 2012
In just two years, tablet computing has gained unprecedented traction. According to research firm Strategy Analytics, global tablet shipment more than doubled during the last three months of 2011, rising to 26.8 units, up from 10.7 million a year earlier. And while Apple continues to dominate the tablet category, having sold a record 15.4 million units during the final quarter of 2011, Android OS tablets have increased their share of the tablet category, growing from 29% in Q4 2010 to 39% in Q4 2011.
The increase in market share is due largely to the entry of the Kindle Fire by Amazon. With Flurry in tens of thousands of Android apps, including many of the most popular, the company estimates that it tracks over 20% of all consumer sessions on more than 90% of all Android devices each day. A session is defined as the launch and subsequent exit (or pause for more than 10 seconds) of an app. For example, a consumer may play a game in one sitting for five minutes. Let’s take a look at the data.
The chart above compares application sessions among all Android tablets before and after the holiday season. For January, we use month-to-date figures, at the time this report was written. Since we’re looking at proportions of use, estimating the remainder of January would not change percentages. For an easier visual comparison, we label Amazon Kindle Fire in orange and Samsung Galaxy Tab in blue. On the left, in November, we see that Samsung Galaxy Tab dominated application session usage on Android, with the Kindle Fire only having recently launched. At that time, the Samsung Galaxy Time was widely considered the only viable competition to the iPad, though a distant second. In January, after the holiday boom in devices and in apps, we see that strong adoption of Kindle Fire, combined with significant downloads driven from the Amazon App Store, resulted in a massive surge in session usage that just edges out the Galaxy Tab. Unrounded, Kindle Fire represents 35.7% of sessions and Galaxy Tab represents 35.6%. Remarkably, and from a standing start, the Kindle Fire overtook the Galaxy Tab in just a few short months. Total Android tablet sessions in January more than tripled over November, with Galaxy Tab sessions increasing by more than 50%. Overall, Android Tablets are growing aggressively as a category.
Amazon Uses Its “Fork” to Eat Samsung’s Lunch
So how can a late entrant like Amazon, with little-to-no hardware DNA, waltz in and knock off a consumer electronics juggernaut like Samsung, a company that also enjoyed strong growth in 2011? This is where we believe things get interesting. In short, Amazon’s launch of Kindle Fire had more in common with an Apple-style launch than it did with aligning with the Android system. To date, the Android world has focused on marketing the operating system and the “power” of the devices, with quality of content and the consumer experience subordinated in priority. With Google managing the Android Market, which lacks content control and a seamless commerce experience, inertia pushes those developers who choose to build for the platform toward advertising models. Developers who monetize through other means tend to make less on the platform. To ensure that it could take full advantage of its unique digital store prowess, Amazon forked the Android operating system.
Apple, on the other hand, understands that great content is the key to increasing the attractiveness of hardware. They learned this hard way during the 1980s when an inferior combination of PC hardware and operating systems overtook Apple computers, primarily due to a lack of software. This time around, for the iPhone and iPad, Apple created a robust economy in which developers could thrive, ensuring their allegiance to innovating for the Apple platform, ultimately making Apple hardware more desirable, and creating a rare, but powerful virtuous cycle. To understand how well Amazon might attract developer support, we studied how well Amazon drives paid downloads in its store versus the Android Market through the Kindle Fire and Galaxy Tab, respectively.
To build this chart, we gathered download data from a “basket” of 5 paid apps that ranked in the top 10 apps in both the Amazon App Store and Android Market during January 2012. We then compared how many of these paid downloads were downloaded to the Galaxy Tab versus the Kindle Fire. From our analysis, we found that the Kindle Fire drove over 2.5 times more paid downloads to consumers than the Samsung Galaxy Tab. This shows that for tablets, the Amazon App Store can already deliver more direct revenue to developers than the Android Market. Even more impressive is that the Galaxy Tab, launched in November 2010, has a much larger existing installed base than the newly launched Kindle Fire. Flurry estimates that the active number of Galaxy Tabs in the market is at least twice that of the Kindle Fire.
Amazon Thinks Different
Amazon’s go-to-market strategy for the Kindle Fire is ground breaking among the Android guard. With its offering, Amazon takes the focus away from the device and operating system, emphasizing content, a differentiated consumer experience and commerce. For its launch, it lined up key content such as Facebook and Angry Birds, as well as offering Amazon Prime, its own streaming TV and movie service. Beyond leveraging its cloud and e-commerce infrastructure, Amazon controls its own store, commanding among the largest aggregations of consumer credit card accounts on the planet. Upon launching the Kindle Fire, consumers must either link to their Amazon account or enter credit card information. This makes the user base 100% payment enabled.
Amazon’s approach to the distribution of digital content is the ultimate razor-razorblade model, where the “stalk” (tablets) is given away for as little as possible and profits are made from the sale of razors (content). Understanding that Amazon is a high volume seller of goods, now becoming ever more digital than physical, sheds light on why they embrace the end-user experience and the religious focus on making the sale of content compelling and easy. Further, it shows us why launching with an aggressive low price penetration strategy for their hardware, priced at $199, was critical to its strategy.
Making the Old New Again
Amazon, who once moved the world from buying goods at retail to buying them online and having them shipped to doorsteps, is now distributing the new form of mobile store via tablets. In a move that reduces the possibility of its own disintermediation, Amazon’s distribution model starts with its own roots: books, music and video (aka “BMV”). Through this move, Kindle Fire is changing the rules of engagement on the Android platform to shape the playing field into one where they, the consumer and the developer win.
Posted by Charles Newark-French on Mon, Jan 09, 2012
The era of mobile computing, catalyzed by Apple and Google, is driving among the largest shifts in consumer behavior over the last forty years. Impressively, its rate of adoption is outpacing both the PC revolution of the 1980s and the Internet Boom of the 1990s. Since 2007, more than 500 million iOS and Android smartphones and tablets have been activated. By the end of 2012, Flurry estimates that the cumulative number of iOS and Android devices activated will surge past 1 billion. According to IDC, over 800 million PCs were sold between 1981 and 2000, making the rate of iOS and Android smart device adoption more than four times faster than that of personal computers.
Powerfully, smartphones and tablets come with broadband connectivity out-of-the-box, instantly combining the best of “Silicon” and “The Cloud” for consumers. The Internet, which served to connect the installed base of PCs, grew to 495 million users by the end of 2001, according to the International Telecommunication Union. With the Internet beginning its commercial ramp in 1996, iOS and Android devices will see double the number of device activations during its first five years compared to the number of Internet users reached during its first five years (Internet 1996 – 2001 vs. Smart devices 2007 – 2012).
On top of this massively growing iOS and Android device installed base, roughly 40 billion applications have already been downloaded from the App Store and Android Market. More than ever, consumers are splitting their time accessing services on the Internet from PCs versus doing so on mobile devices from apps. Last summer, Flurry published a report detailing how the average smartphone user, for the first time ever, began spending more time in their mobile applications than they do browsing the web. Updating the analysis, Flurry finds the usage gap continues to widen. Let’s look at the updated numbers.
The chart compares how daily interactive consumption has changed over the last 18 months between the web (both desktop and mobile web) and mobile native apps. For the web, shown in green, we built a model using publicly available data from comScore and Alexa. For mobile application usage, shown in blue, we used Flurry Analytics data, which tracks anonymous sessions across more than 140,000 applications. We estimate this accounts for approximately one third of all mobile application activity, which we scaled-up accordingly for this analysis.
Since conducting our first analysis in June 2011, time spent in mobile applications has grown. Smartphone and tablet users now spend over an hour and half of their day using applications. Meanwhile, average time spent on the web has shrunk, from 74 minutes to 72 minutes. Users seem to be substituting websites for applications, which may be more convenient to access throughout the day.
Our analysis shows that people are now spending less time on the traditional web than they did during the summer 2011. This drop appears to be driven largely by a decrease in time spent on Facebook from the traditional web. In June 2011, the average Facebook user spent over 33 minutes on average per day on the website. Now, that number is below 24 minutes. Time spent on the web without Facebook has grown at a modest rate of 2% between June 2011 and December 2011.
The analysis also shows that people are spending ever more time in applications. In fact, time spent in apps and the web, combined, has grown as users lead a more connected life. This growth though has been driven entirely by applications. The growth in time spent in mobile applications is slowing – from above 23% between December 2010 and June 2011 this year to a little over 15% from June 2011 to December 2011. The growth is predominately being driven by an increase in the number of sessions, as opposed to longer session lengths. Consumers are using their apps more frequently.
Facebook Pushes into Mobile Apps
Based on our analysis, we believe that Facebook users, and users of other traditional style websites, are increasingly accessing services through mobile applications than from desktops. Nielsen recently reported that Facebook is the most used app on Android among 14 – 44 year olds, surpassing usage of Google’s own native, pre-installed apps. Additionally, Facebook Messenger became the top downloaded app, at least one time during 2011, across more than 100 different App Store countries. In the U.S., the largest App Store market, Facebook Messenger ranked as the top overall app across most of the holiday week, during which more downloads occur compared to any other week.
With Facebook’s recent push into HTML5 with Project Spartan, where apps built for Facebook’s platform can run on top of the Facebook app, instead of requiring the user to launch the iOS app equivalent, this poses a disintermediation challenge to Apple. As Apple and Google continue to battle for consumers through the operating system and devices, Facebook is demonstrating that it can leverage its hold over consumers at the software level, through the power of the social network, across multiple platforms.
Facebook and Google are already locked in a battle for the online consumer, with Facebook having steadily taken share from the search engine giant over the last several years. Recently, as Google countered with its socially-oriented Google Plus, Circles and Hangouts services, Facebook added features such as news feeds to further lock in consumers to its service by obviating the need to discover content through search.
Likewise, Apple’s recently launched iCloud service, which allows consumers to store their most personal content, including music, photos and contacts, as well as its deep integration with social-service, Twitter, appears to buttress against Facebook’s ability to control the consumer relationship. With games as the top app category across Facebook, iOS and Android, as well as having become increasingly social in nature, Facebook is countering to reclaim valuable game play sessions it earned from its own platform play launched in 2007, rather than simply surrendering them to iOS and Android, who have effectively wooed consumers off of the web platform to mobile apps.
Games & Social Networking Dominate Mobile App Usage
With mobile app usage soaring, Flurry additionally studied which categories most occupy consumers’ time. The results are shown in the pie chart below.
The chart clearly shows that Games and Social Networking categories capture the significant majority of consumers’ time. Consumers spend nearly half their time using Games, and a third in Social Networking apps. Further considering that Flurry does not track Facebook usage, the Social Networking category is actually larger. Combined, from just what Flurry can see, these two categories control a whopping 79% of consumers’ total app time. This breakdown in usage reveals Facebook’s inherent popularity as the leading social network, as well as how important controlling the game category is for all platform providers. As we drill down into the category data, consumers use these two categories more frequently, and for longer average session lengths, compared to other categories.
Any way we slice it, Games and Social Networking apps deliver the most engaging experience on the web and mobile today, and set the stage for the battleground for controlling the consumer relationship going forward for all platform providers on all platforms.
Posted by Peter Farago on Mon, Jan 02, 2012
The last week of the year, from December 25 through December 31, sees more iOS and Android device activations compared to any other week of the year. Starting with Christmas Day, the largest single device activation day of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is filled with significantly elevated device activations and app downloads. For application makers, this holiday “power week” is far more important than the run-up to Christmas itself. This report reveals that the last week of 2011 was the largest week for device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history.
For this report, Flurry leverages its data-set from over 140,000 apps running on the significant majority of iOS and Android devices. With its application penetration, Flurry can detect over 90% of all new devices activated each day. Additionally, with its analytics service in more than 20% of all applications downloaded on a given day from the App Store and Android Market, Flurry can reliably estimate total iOS and Android downloads. To benchmark against the market, Flurry regularly triangulates its device and download figures with data released publicly by Google and Apple.
In its most recent report, Flurry estimated that a record-breaking 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day, along with an equally record-breaking 242 million application downloads. Studying the data from December 25 – December 31, additional records were set, now for the highest number of device activations and app downloads of any week in history. Over the holiday “power week,” Flurry estimates that over 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated, and 1.2 billion applications were downloaded. Let’s drill down further into the downloads.
The columns in the chart compare the number of app downloads during Christmas through New Year’s Day (on the right) versus the average of the first two equivalent weeks of December (on the left). The seven days from December 25 – December 31 spanned from a Sunday to a Saturday. As such, we take the average of the first two full Sunday-to-Saturday weeks in December to establish a baseline. The average downloads over these weeks are surprisingly even. For background, the third full Sunday-to-Saturday week, not shown in the chart, December 18 – 24, is elevated slightly due primarily to December 24 downloads. Up until the final week of the year, this penultimate week set the download record with 857 million downloads. The final week of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, grew by 60% over the early-December baseline, historically punching through the billion download barrier for the first time ever to deliver 1.2 billion downloads.
This second chart shows the top twenty countries across which the record 1.2 billion downloads were distributed. Starting from the left, the U.S. took the lion’s share with 509 million downloads, or 42.3%. Referencing an earlier report, wherein Flurry sized the current installed base and market upside for each country, it’s not surprising that the U.S. continues to lead the rest of the world by such a large margin. We estimate that just prior to the holidays, there were 109 million active iOS and Android devices in the U.S. market. Compared to the worldwide total active installed base of 246 million, this was 41%. China, the world’s second largest app market, which has roughly one-third of the U.S. installed base saw only one-fifth of the relative downloads. It’s important to note that the celebration of Christmas as a holiday impacted download performance. While the United States widely celebrates Christmas, China is largely non-religious, with over 60% of the population considering themselves agnostic or atheist. In China, Christians make up just 3 – 4% of the population.
Following the trend that Western countries more widely celebrate Christmas – note the higher positions of countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, Spain and Mexico in the chart – these countries over-indexed against largely non-Christian countries of China, South Korea and Japan. For example, South Korea and Japan have the 4th and 5th largest smart device installed bases of all countries, yet they ranked 7th and 10th, respectively, for downloads over the record week. Christmas is not recognized as a national holiday in Japan, and in South Korea, roughly half the population self-identifies as non-religious. As a point of interest, Canada appears to have over-indexed the most, using its 8th largest installed base to drive the 4th most downloads over the holiday period.
Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one-billion-download-barrier per week will become more common-place. While iOS and Android growth continues to amaze, the market is still by all measures relatively nascent. We look forward to continuing to chart the unprecedented adoption of mobile computing devices, usage of applications and the way in which this technology is changing consumer behavior worldwide. Happy New Year from everyone at Flurry.
Posted by Peter Farago on Tue, Dec 27, 2011
Historically, more iOS and Android apps are downloaded on Christmas than on any other day of the year. This is due to a massive influx of smartphones and tablets given as gifts. As fast as loved-ones can unwrap their shiny, new Galaxy IIs, iPhones, iPads, Kindle Fires, et cetera, they start loading them up with new apps.
With record-breaking mobile growth for both Apple and Google this year, Flurry has been anticipating an equally record-breaking Christmas. In 2011, Apple’s App Store is on pace to exceed 10 billion downloads, which will double the cumulative number of downloads earned across 2008, 2009 and 2010. The Android Market also set records, more than tripling its life-to-date downloads of 3 billion, reached in May 2011, to now over 10 billion cumulative downloads reached this December.
Yes, Virginia, Santa Claus delivered that many new iOS and Android devices
The chart below shows the number of new iOS and Android devices detected worldwide by Flurry on Christmas Day. With more than 140,000 apps using Flurry Analytics, Flurry detects roughly 100% of all new iOS and Android devices activated each day. The company regularly triangulates its device coverage with publicly announced figures from Google and Apple.
Putting into perspective the sheer size of new devices activated on Christmas Day, Flurry established a baseline using the average from the first 20 days of December. Over this period, daily activations had little variance, ranging between 1.3 to 1.8 million, with an average of 1.5 million. On Christmas Day, activations jumped to more than 6.8 million, a 353% increase over the baseline. Compared to Christmas Day 2010, the previous single-day record, with 2.8 million device activations, Christmas 2011 grew by more than 140%.
With a record number of iOS and Android devices flooding the market, we next look at the surge in app downloads. For these figures, Flurry estimates its percentage penetration per platform to estimate total market app downloads. The company also benchmarks download volumes tracked in its system against publicly released app download milestones from Apple and Google.
Every time an app is downloaded, a developer gets his wings
The above chart shows that, compared to the baseline, app downloads more than doubled on Christmas. Specifically, over the December 1 – 20 baseline, download volumes increased by 125% on Christmas. Note that, relative to the percentage increase in device activations, we expect the percentage increase in downloads to be lower. This is because of the sizable device installed base in the market onto which apps are constantly downloaded. This keeps the baseline higher vis a vis the Christmas peak. However, it’s also worth noting that nearly a quarter of a billion downloads occurred on Christmas Day 2011, which is more than double any other day in the history of iOS and Android devices, except December 24, which delivered roughly 150 million downloads.
As observed in 2010, Flurry expects elevated download levels from Christmas through New Year’s Day. Over this period, we anticipate approximately 1 billion total downloads.
Just like 24 hours of A Christmas Story
For our final chart, we tripled-dog dared ourselves to show how voraciously consumers download apps on Christmas. The chart below compares how many downloads occurred, per hour, over the course of Christmas Day, compared to the Dec 1 – 20 baseline.
The blue line, which creates an average “day” using December 1 – 20, displays the number of downloads over a 24 hour period, per hour. The sum of all hours on the blue line equals 108 million. Starting on the left, at 5 AM, there were 720,000 downloads. Over the baseline “day,” the rate of downloads per hour increased, with its peak at 9 PM of over 8 million downloads. The grey area represents the “prime-time” slot of 7 pm – 10 pm. All time zones are normalized, meaning that in our calculations, 7 AM in London is lined up with 7 AM in San Francisco, which is when it appears most people start unwrapping gifts under the tree.
Now, comparing the green line – Christmas Day – to the blue baseline, we notice Christmas downloads dominate each hour of the day. From 8 AM to Midnight, there are over twice as many downloads per hour. And already by 9 AM, hourly downloads on Christmas exceeded 10 million. At its zenith, from 7 PM to 9 PM, hourly downloads exceeded 15 million. Between 11 AM to 11 PM, more than 175 million apps were downloaded. By itself, this half day delivers over 70% more downloads than the entire baseline day.
In our most recent report, Flurry outlined the remaining, massive growth potential in both developed and emerging economies for smart device adoption. With this record-breaking year coming to a close, we eagerly look forward to 2012, with all signs pointing toward accelerating growth. Here’s to a Happy New Year for app developers.
Posted by Peter Farago on Fri, Dec 23, 2011
In 2007, Apple and Google started a mobile computing revolution. Over the last four years, adoption of this new class of smartphone has been unprecedented. With powerful devices, connected to broadband networks and rich digital stores, an app economy was quickly built on top of it.
Beginning last year, Flurry observed that consumers using apps began expanding beyond early-adopting U.S. and Western European markets, starting to include more emerging economies. In a previous post, we shared details about this shift, highlighting the fastest growing international markets, with emphasis on China’s extraordinary growth.
As 2011 comes to a close, and we look forward to 2012, we size today’s installed base of iOS and Android smart devices (smartphones and tablets) as well as identify markets where the most future upside exists. We start by looking at how many active iOS and Android devices run applications by country.
Using data collected from Flurry’s data-set of more than 140,000 apps running on smart devices worldwide, we get a snapshot of how many iOS and Android devices ran apps over the last 30 days. Note that we gross up our figures to reflect differences in penetration per platform to provide market-level estimates. Among the top 20 countries, the U.S. still makes up the largest chunk of the world’s active installed base, with 109 million out of 264 million, or 41%.
Of note, China and South Korea now hold two of the top five positions, boasting addressable audiences greater than that of more developed countries such as Japan, France and Germany. Also worth noting is that our count of 264 million active units in the market is about half of what Apple and Google publicly state have been activated. The difference is primarily due to old device replacement. Flurry is counting recently used devices versus life-to-date device activations.
With smart device adoption skyrocketing worldwide, we next look at which markets hold the most future promise. With greatly varying disposable income per country, and recognizing that children do not purchase devices, Flurry used available data from several sources to adjust its data for an apples-to-apples comparison. First we used the “adult” population counts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which IMF defines as 15 to 64 years of age. Next, we adjusted our numbers based on the size of the middle class in each country, primarily using a study by Miller-McCune. We finally estimated the size of the upper class per country, who by extension can also afford a smart device. After making adjustments, we are left with adult consumers who have the financial means to afford a smartphone device per country. Doing so, populous countries like India, China and Brazil, which also suffer from income disparity, are not over-estimated in our addressable market calculations.
Starting from the left, China has 122 million consumers who do not yet use an iPhone or Android device, but could afford one. In short, this chart represents untapped potential. Emerging economies – China, India and Brazil – make up three of the top five market opportunities. Over the next several years, as these countries continue to modernize, they will significantly expand the worldwide addressable audience for smartphones.
Bringing the data together, we next look at market maturity, which is the measure of how penetrated smartphone devices are among a country’s addressable audience. To illustrate which markets are most mature, we chart the top 10 countries ranked by penetration.
The vertical axis measures our total addressable audience (TAM), which we define as adults, 15 – 64, who are at least middle-class. The TAM per country is represented by the larger, light blue circles. The U.S., with the largest light blue circle, has the largest TAM at 200 million. The horizontal axis shows percent penetration, which is the active user (iOS or Android device that used an app over the last 30 days) divided by the TAM. For example, Sweden is the most mature country with 3.2 million of 5 million (66%) addressable consumers already using iOS and Android devices. France, which ranks 10th in maturity, has 9.6 million of 34 million (28%) consumers using iOS and Android devices. So, from left to right, penetration increases. And from bottom to top, TAM increases. The U.S. leads the world in installed base because its large, addressable audience has been well penetrated, 91 million of 200 million (55%).
Completing our study, we look at the world’s largest addressable markets, regardless of penetration.
Because this chart measures future potential, TAMs are much larger relative to active user bases. The result, visually, is a lot more “light blue.” Many of the world’s largest countries have largely un-penetrated markets, primarily due to standards of living (emerging markets) or increased competition for consumers’ disposable income (developed markets). In either case, the TAM is there, but the adoption hasn’t yet occurred. So, many of these markets are future bets with the time of maturity somewhat variable and unknown. In this chart, the U.S. has both the largest current installed base and market upside. Again, this is because of its unique, well-penetrated and large, affluent population. Next China, given its very large population (1.3 billion), along with a growing middle class who has already begun adopting smart devices, has the world’s second largest market potential. In comparison, even though India has the world’s second largest population (1.2 billion), its TAM is much smaller than China’s because of India’s very low standard of living. The result is that, even though its total population is not far behind China’s, its total addressable market is. Further, the adoption of smartphones and tablets among its TAM has been small. Finally, Japan, the world’s fourth largest market, has a lot of upside given light penetration of iOS and Anroid devices against its large, addressable market.
iOS and Android sales boomed in 2011, with international smartphone and tablet adoption accelerating. As we look forward to 2012 and beyond, we expect the trend of international expansion to continue. With the world’s estimated middle class now totaling 1.8 billion, there remains a lot of unconquered territory for Apple and Google, who currently lead the charge in driving smart device adoption. This is equally good news for developers, who build apps for these platforms, and directly benefit from their installed base growth.
Posted by Peter Farago on Tue, Dec 13, 2011
At the recent Le Web conference in France, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt declared that “Android is ahead of the iPhone now.” According to Schmidt, Android’s success is due to “unit volume, Ice Cream Sandwich,” because “the price is lower” and because “there are more vendors.”
Android Momentum
Google announced last week that worldwide Android Market app downloads now exceed one billion per month. Compared to iOS, which surpassed 18 billion total downloads in October, Google revealed that the Android Market recently surpassed 10 billion total downloads. This comes on the heels of comScore’s latest MobiLens report, showing that, for the three months ending in October, Android devices now account for 46.3% of U.S. smartphone subscribers versus 28.1% for Apple. By these accounts, Google Android has momentum. Mr. Schmidt further predicted at Le Web that, within six months time, Android would become the first platform for which developers build.
At Flurry, we track developer support across the platforms that compete for their commitment. When companies create new projects in Flurry Analytics, they download platform-specific SDKs for their apps. Since resources are limited, choices developers make to support a specific platform signal confidence, as they invest their R&D budget where they expect the greatest return. Further, because developers set up analytics several weeks before shipping their final apps, Flurry has a glimpse into the bets developers are making ahead of the market.
In total, over 55,000 companies use Flurry Analytics across more than 135,000 applications. For this report, we study new project starts for 2011, during which developers set up analytics for approximately 50,000 apps.
The chart shows the number of applications integrated with Flurry Analytics during 2011, by quarter, starting with Q1 on the left, and finishing with Q4 on the right. The percent of new projects created for iOS is represented in grey. Google Android’s share of new projects is shown in green. Note that we estimated the remainder of December based on the first third of the month’s data already collected. We further estimate that Flurry Analytics powers approximately 25% of all apps downloaded from the App Store and Android Market combined.
Over the year, developer support for Android has declined from more than one-third of all new projects, at the beginning of the year, down to roughly one-quarter by the end. While the market nearly doubled for both platforms, we believe key events changed the proportion of support between these two platforms. Of particular note, Apple expanded distribution for iOS devices beyond its long-standing exclusive with AT&T to include Verizon in February and Sprint in October. Further, the highly successful launches of iPad 2 in February and iPhone 4S in October resulted in increased developer support for Apple. By contrast, Android does not enjoy a truly recognizable flagship device among its army of OEMs supporting the platform.
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
In particular, the market expanded aggressively in Q3 in anticipation of iPhone 4S support and the upcoming holiday season. Flurry saw a similar boom in developer activity, ramping up to the holidays, in both 2009 and 2010. And while allegiance to iOS has been more tilted toward Apple in previous years, new project starts for iOS still outnumber those for Android approximately three-to-one.
Android Momentum Revisited
Now let’s return to Google’s position that “Android is now ahead of iPhone.” In terms of the number of devices activated per day by consumers, this is indeed the case. In November, Google released that 200 million total Android devices have been activated with 550 thousand now activated daily. In October, Apple announced that over 250 million iOS devices had been activated, and Flurry estimates that more than 450 thousand are activated daily. With converging installed base numbers, and Android now edging out iOS for daily activations, the key question remains: Why are developers still supporting iOS three times more than Android?
Show Me the Money
Anecdotally, developers consistently tell us that they make more money on iOS, about three to four times as much. To be sure, we pulled a sample of in-app purchase data from a set of top apps with versions on both iOS and Android, comprising of several million daily active users (DAUs). Running the numbers, we find that, on average, for every $1.00 generated on iOS, the same app will generate $0.24 on Android.
Android ecosystem challenges have been widely publicized, from OS fragmentation to concerns about the impact of not curating the Android Market. However, the largest single factor that appears to impact developer support for the platform is the consumer’s ability to pay. This comes down to Google Checkout penetration. Upon setting up an iOS device, a consumer must associate either a credit or gift card to her iTunes account. In theory, this means that 100% of all iOS device users are payment enabled. This has not been the case for Android, resulting in lower revenue generation possibilities on the platform. With the recent integration of Google Wallet and Google Checkout, as well as their current $0.10 Android app sale to spur new account sign-ups, Google appears to be taking steps to correct this.
While exact Google Checkout penetration is unknown, the respective revenue generated by each platform for same apps, provides the morale of the story: Despite installed base numbers and daily activations, the almighty dollar still drives business decision making among application developers. And with the critical holiday season upon us, developers are betting on iOS for Christmas 2011.
Posted by Peter Farago on Wed, Nov 09, 2011
Digital content distribution has disrupted several notable industries. With the original iPod media player and iTunes Store, Apple changed the face of the music industry. And the Internet, in particular, has played a role in commoditizing news. All told, digital distribution of media has starkly impacted news, magazines, books, television, music, film and more.
Recently, no industry has been more impacted by digital distribution than video games. Leading the disruption are iOS and Android devices, whose free and inexpensive games, distributed across a massive installed base of powerful and networked tablet and mobile phone form factors, have already disrupted billions of dollars of game revenue. In this blog post, Flurry focuses on how mobile devices have severely altered the shape and flow of revenue in the multi-billion dollar portable game category.
Portable gaming, played primarily on Nintendo DS and Sony PSP devices, has been dominated by these two companies for over two decades. In this model, at retail, consumers pay around $200 for the gaming device and up to $40 for popular game cartridges. Because of the similar form factor, overlap in consumer base (especially younger players on iPod touch) and the casual nature of game content, Flurry combines iOS and Android devices with traditional portable devices to form the category. With the inclusion of smartphone game revenue into the category, shifts taking place in market share become clearer.
The chart displays the share of U.S. revenue generated for portable games from 2009 to 2011. Note that we project November and December for 2011, based on their ratio to the first 10 months of the year, as observed in 2009 and 2010. Starting on the left, for 2009, we calculate $2.7 billion in total U.S. portable game revenue. For 2010 and 2011, we estimate $2.5 billion and $3.3 billion, respectively.
The most striking trend is that iOS and Android games have tripled their market share from roughly 20% in 2009 to nearly 60% in just two years. Simultaneously, Nintendo, the once dominant player, has been crushed down to owning about one-third of market in 2011, from having controlled more than two-thirds in 2009. Combined, iOS and Android game revenue delivered $500 million, $800 million and $1.9 billion over 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively.
As reported by Flurry earlier this year, the freemium game model is revolutionizing and expanding revenue on mobile devices. And just as smartphone game revenue has climbed aggressively, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP revenue has dropped precipitously. Over the last three years, Nintendo and Sony posted a combined $2.2 billion, $1.6 billion and $1.4 billion for 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively.
Within the portable category, an abundance of digitally distributed free and $0.99 games, available on hardware, that is both comparably priced and more powerful than traditional portable game devices, better appeals to many consumers. As a result, the days of paying $25, or more, for a cartridge at a retail store may soon end. Further, the installed base of iOS and Android devices has not only reached critical mass, but also continues to grow at unprecedented rates. In their latest public statements regarding installed base, Apple and Google reported a total of 250 million iOS devices and 190 million Android devices activated, respectively.
Due in part to its demise in the portable game category, Nintendo is facing its first fiscal year loss since the company began reporting profits in 1981. Combined with slumping Wii sales, Nintendo is indeed struggling, even with its powerful stable of original IP led by Mario Brothers, and despite the fact that the exchange rate between the Japanese Yen and U.S. dollar is currently in its favor.
Equally concerning for Nintendo is that the battle for video game dominance is entering the living room, with entries by both Apple and Google into the TV category. Ostensibly, this new class of hardware will create a new platform upon which the digital distribution model of apps will be overlaid. Now, in addition to tablet form-factor competition, the console game industry, which currently pits Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo against each other, will additionally face competition from Apple and Google TV initiatives. Beyond 2011, if Nintendo continues to face financial hardship, it may be forced to consider difficult choices such as divesting its hardware business and distributing its content, for the first time, across non-proprietary platforms.
In our last review of the portable game category, comparing 2009 to 2010 revenue, we believed Mario was already “standing on a burning platform.” With 2011 numbers now added to the story, it appears that the inferno has intensified, and that Nintendo may truly face a Nokia-like decision to jump or perish in the flames of its own burning platform.
A Note about Methodology
For this analysis, Flurry used a combination of publicly available data, released across several reports by the NPD group, along with its own data collected from mobile devices. Flurry Analytics tracks more than 20 billion use sessions per month across more than 125,000 applications on more than 330 million unique devices per month. Nearly 40% of all app use sessions occur in games. With its coverage across applications, Flurry can reliably estimate the revenue generated per ranked position in the iTunes App Store and Android Market. With this data, Flurry calculated year-over-year revenue generated by the smartphone gaming category, and combined this with available Nintendo DS and Sony PSP software sales.
Posted by Peter Farago on Wed, Nov 02, 2011
The era of mobile computing, heralded by Apple in 2007 with the debut of the iPhone, has put powerful, networked computers into consumers’ hands. Onto these devices, consumers have downloaded billions of apps. In 2011 alone, we estimate that 25 billion iOS and Android apps will be downloaded. And Flurry expects that number to roughly double in 2012.
Like other new technology, adoption of iOS and Android devices began primarily in North America and Western Europe, where disposable income is higher. However, as prices have come down for older iOS models, and OEMs supporting Android have offered more affordable down-market devices, we’re seeing a clear shift in consumer app usage to international markets, including emerging economies. Let’s warm up with a chart showing how mobile app sessions are expanding outside of the U.S.
The chart above compares mobile app sessions tracked by Flurry Analytics in January 2011 and October 2011. Flurry now tracks over 20 billion mobile app sessions per month across more than 120,000 applications. The green area shows the percent of app sessions occurring in the United States, the dominant mobile app market. While the absolute number of sessions in the U.S. has doubled between January and October, its share of total sessions has declined from 55% to 47%. This means that the rest of the world is growing faster. Looking at the balance of the top 10 countries (UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China), this group has increased in collective sessions by 2.7 times between January to October, resulting in an increase in total session-share from 28% to 31%. Further, the rest of the world (another 217 countries across which Flurry tracks user sessions), has increased in session-share from 17% to 22%. Among all this growth, there is one country that has caught our attention more than any other.
Meet the Mobile Dragon
You may have heard of China, and its 1.3 billion people. In fact, you most likely associate the country with high volume, affordable manufacturing. However, China is also fast becoming one of the world’s most promising consumer economies. Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that 2010 foreign direct investment in China rose to a record $106 billion. Included in this are investments by companies such as Wal-Mart, which co-invested over $500 million in online retailing. According to the International Monetary Fund, China has the world’s second largest gross domestic product, behind the U.S., and ahead of Japan, Germany and France. Additionally, the Boston Consulting Group released a report in November 2010 forecasting that the number of middle-income and affluent consumers will almost triple in the next 10 years to 415 million. As it relates to mobile, China has the most cellphone users in the world, with over 950 million users according to statistics released by China’s Ministry of Industry last week.
To understand how this translates into mobile app adoption, Flurry compiled a list of the fastest growing mobile app markets in terms of sessions tracked by our service. We show the chart below.
This chart ranks the top 10 countries, in terms of mobile app session growth, from January 2011 to October 2011. To be included in the analysis, countries had to have generated at least 10 million monthly sessions in January. Inspecting the chart, it’s clear that China’s growth is astronomical. While the top 100 countries are averaging session growth of over 200%, China is delivering more than four times this growth rate, spurred by a massive population voraciously adopting applications.
China Vaults to Second Largest App Economy
With its hyper-growth in app sessions, China has moved up the ranks among the world’s top countries to now occupy the second spot behind the U.S. The graph below charts China’s share of total mobile app sessions per month, relative to other top countries during 2011. Note that to get a better view of movements among countries ranked second through fifth, we exclude the U.S. from the chart, given its scale.
China, represented by the red line, began the year ranked tenth in terms of app sessions, with 1.8% of all sessions tracked by Flurry. By April, China had climbed to fifth with 2.7% of all sessions, and, in July, overtook the United Kingdom to become the second largest country, with 5.4% of sessions. By the end of October, China had further grown to 7.3% of sessions. The U.S., which declined in sessoin-share over the year, finished in October with 47%. If both China and the U.S. were to continue along their respective trajectories, China could overtake the U.S. by the end of 2013, with both countries converging around 23% app session-share.
Finally, we took a look at AppCircle, Flurry’s mobile app traffic acquisition network to understand advertising dollars companies are willing to spend on acquisition per market. In this part of the business, we measure from which country consumers are downloading news apps advertised to them. The country of origin is a reflection of geographic consumer demand. Overall, downloads of new apps from China grew from 1.2% to 12% over the course of the year, from January through October. Similar to the total growth we saw in Flurry Analytics user sessions, the Flurry AppCircle network grew by 2.5 times. The chart below shows AppCircle-driven downloads per country for the month of October 2011.
Whether studying China by existing app session generated or new demand for apps, the growth rates are similar. As one of the fastest modernizing and largest countries in the world, the adoption of mobile apps in China is unprecedented. For app developers, who more traditionally look at North America and Europe, China is a market too compelling to ignore. A new market has emerged, and China is the new mobile app dragon.
Posted by Peter Farago on Mon, Oct 31, 2011
Apple and Google have ushered in a new era of mobile computing whose consumer adoption is rivaled only by the PC revolution of the 1980s and the Internet boom of the 1990s. Since 2007, more than 440 million iOS and Android devices have been activated, with 1 million additional devices across both platforms now activated each day.
On top of this massive and rapidly expanding platform, a software battle is raging. With very low barriers to entry, and friction-free digital distribution, companies have been feverishly building, shipping and updating applications, intent on capturing and monetizing consumer audiences. To illustrate this growth, let’s look at the number of available apps in the App Store vs. the Android Market.
This chart is comprised of publicly available data. Where data wasn’t available for the same month in both markets, we estimated the number of available apps based on interpolation (e.g., approximating a point between two existing data points), or by looking at the growth rate leading up to a specific month. The number of apps is growing significantly in both markets. And while the App Store has attracted more apps to date, the Android Market is closing the gap. Now, let’s turn our attention to total app downloads.
The chart above sums Android Market and App Store downloads per month. Starting on the left, with January 2010, we show downloads per month every three months, until we reach October 2011. In October 2011, we estimate over 2.6 billion apps were downloaded. The number of apps now downloaded is four times greater than this time last year, in October 2010. With the holiday season under two months away, the 3 billion-mark download per month mark surely will be shattered this December. Month-over-month, app downloads have been growing at an astounding rate 11.4%. With app downloads growing swiftly, even faster than the number of apps being made available, let’s now look at app retention.
This chart shows the percent of consumers that continue using an app, since their first use, over 12 months. At the far left, marked as month “0,” 100% of a consumer cohort begins using an app. After three months, 24% of them continue using. After 6 months, this percent shrinks to 14%, and, by 12 months, only 4% are left. For this analysis, we compiled data from 25 apps downloaded a cumulative 550 million times.
With app downloads increasing month-over-month and app usage not only climbing, but also surpassing web usage, we know that consumers are both discovering and using apps more than ever. And while the industry often talks about discovery as a problem, we think the real problem is traffic acquisition. To understand this, we turn to the web.
Online, website marketers don’t stop marketing after they get a consumer to visit the site only for the first time. They can get in front of the consumer in various ways again, and spur a return visit by having the consumer click on a link. Typically, online, a visit starts from an organic search result, but search doesn’t exist for apps the same way, and consumers seem to browse more, especially given touch interfaces. The closest thing to search in the app world is a consumer browsing the top ranking lists, which represents “popularity” in a similar way to top ranking organic search results. However, in the app world, top rank lists are more like “paid search” since heavy advertising is what typically launches an app to rank high, at least for a while.
Further, always trying to rank high, as a tactic, is not only untargeted and expensive, but also suffers from diminishing returns. First, the bar required to make the top 25 keeps rising, as the installed base of consumers grows and more apps compete for a fixed number of top spots. Regarding diminishing returns, an app can only appeal to first-time-users each time it ranks. It’s a pure first-time acquisition tool. App users don’t re-launch apps when seeing them in the top rankings. They need to go to their app icon and launch from there. So as an app’s installed based grows over months, even years, the relative number of incremental users that can be added from ranking in the charts continues becomes relatively smaller. In other words, over time, an app is better off targeting its much larger installed base of users to increase usage. This is the equivalent of traffic acquisition.
The key challenge is that developers lack the tools to bring traffic back to their app, post-download. And, therefore, the industry has a traffic acquisition problem, not a discovery problem. Only when compelling ways of connecting with existing app users are established, that allow the easy re-launch of an app, can app makers address retention through marketing, and fully control their own traffic acquisition.
Posted by Peter Farago on Thu, Sep 29, 2011
On broadcast television, brands seek to reach their target audiences as efficiently as possible. For example, a brand might run a TV campaign targeting 24 – 35 year old females through prime-time shows that reach that desired audience.
Prime-time, from 7 pm to 11 pm, is widely known as the part of the day that attracts the most viewers on television. In advertising parlance, this is referred to as a “daypart.” And given its popularity, networks charge significantly more for ads aired during this time.
On radio, “drive time” is the most valuable daypart. Online, the evening has seen an increase in relative usage with the popularity of social networks like Facebook, instant messaging like Skype and video-on-demand services like Hulu.
This report focuses on dayparting in mobile apps. Through Flurry Analytics, Flurry tracks more than 110,000 mobile apps on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and J2ME. The sample used for this study assembled a bundle of popular iOS and Android apps across games, social networking, music, news, sports and communication categories. In total, this group of apps is used by more than 15 million consumers each day.
For a point of comparison, we overlaid our mobile app daypart graph onto a chart shared by Michael Zimbalist, VP Research for the New York Times, in a guest post he authored for AdAge. Let’s take a look at the findings.
The chart shows the percent of its own total user-base that a given medium reaches, each hour of the day, starting at 5 am. In keeping with Mr. Zimbalist’s analysis, we also limit our mobile app data set to include those 15 years of age and older. For each curve, the percent displayed on the y-axis relates to the proportion of consumers reached during a given hour on that respective medium. Note that the total audience size for each medium reached varies in terms of its own absolute number of users. We’ve chosen to overlay Flurry’s data onto this chart to compare the shape of the curves, which indicate the relative concentration of usage during different times of the day. For reference, we shaded the hours that make up the prime-time television slot.
Our analysis shows that, compared to relative TV viewing and Internet usage, mobile app usage is higher from 6 am to 6 pm. And while the relative percent of television viewers surpasses that of mobile app users during prime-time, mobile app usage continues to climb until 9 pm, exceeding relative Internet usage throughout the prime-time window. Mobile consumers are using apps either instead of, or along-side prime-time television and the Internet. In fact, the percent of relative mobile app usage is greater than that of relative Internet usage every hour of every day.
To provide a tangible example of audience size for mobile apps, we estimate that the combined number of active iOS and Android devices in the U.S. is approximately 110 million. Taking 10 am as a daypart of mobile apps (the red curve), 30% of iOS and Android device owners, or 33 million consumers, use an application during this hour. In theory, apps are like TV shows, in that they reach specific audiences. With the eventual ability to target apps by various criteria such as age, gender, dayparts and more, advertisers can one day target a tightly defined audience that uses different applications.
To put the sheer size of the mobile application audience into perspective, consider that the American Idol finale, which airs once per season, reaches approximately 20 million viewers on that day. Mobile apps already reach more than 20 million U.S. consumers per hour, from 7 am to 11 pm. That’s already the equivalent of 17 American Idol finales each day, or more than 6,200 American Idol finales per year.
With Google recently acquiring Motorola and Apple gearing up to launch the iPhone 5 this fall, these numbers will continue to grow. Further, with companies like Amazon pushing harder into tablets with its recently announced Kindle Fire, and companies like Nokia and Microsoft partnering to stay competitive, we can easily imagine a world of mobile apps where it’s prime-time all the time.