Posted by Simon Khalaf on Fri, Jan 25, 2013
Retail is among the world’s largest industries. The top 10 global retailers are made up of 5 from the U.S. and 5 from Europe, collectively driving annual revenue in excess of $1.1 trillion. The U.S. Commerce Department estimates that U.S. domestic revenue exceeded $4.7 trillion in 2011 and is growing. Two thirds of the U.S. GDP, the world’s leading economy, comes from retail consumption.
Now, the retail industry is colliding with the mobile app economy. Just consider that, according to a recent IBM report, more than 18% of shoppers used a smartphone or tablet to access a retailer's website on Cyber Monday in 2012, an increase of 70% over 2011. Mobile made up 13% of total web-based purchases. The App & Mortar economy has arrived.
In this report, Flurry explores the shopping app category. For our analysis, we measured time spent by consumers across more than 1,800 iOS and Android shopping apps from December 2011 to December 2012. Shopping apps were found predominately within the Shopping category on Google Play, and within the Lifestyle and Food & Drink categories in the Apple App Store. From there, we broke down “Shopping” into five sub-categories: Retailer Apps, Price Comparison, Purchase Assistant, Online Marketplace and Daily Deals. Let’s take a look at how time spent in shopping apps is growing.
The chart above shows growth in time spent by consumers across the top five shopping sub-categories. For reference, indicated by the dotted light-blue lines, we overlay growth rates for All Shopping Apps and for All Apps that Flurry measures (over 270,000). Starting on the left, we see that consumer time spent in Retailer Apps has skyrocketed by 525% from December 2011 to December 2012. This growth far exceeds total shopping app growth of 274%, as well as overall app growth 132%, represented again by the light-blue dotted lines. Time spent in Price Comparison and Purchase Assistant apps have also grown significantly, by 247% and 228%, respectively. Finally, still growing, but not as quickly as other shopping categories are Online Marketplace and Daily Deals apps at 178% and 126%, respectively.
For reference, below are examples of the kind of apps across shopping sub-categories in this analysis. Please note that example apps may not be Flurry customers.
- Retailer Apps: Walmart, Target, Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Saks 5th Avenue
- Price Comparison: RedLaser, Grocery iQ
- Purchase Assistant: ShopSavvy, ShopAdvisor
- Online Marketplace: eBay, Amazon
- Daily Deals: Groupon, Living Social
In the chart above, we next look at the shift in time spent across shopping sub-categories. Retailers, represented by the dark blue wedge, saw the greatest increase in time spent, from a share of 15% of time spent by consumers in shopping apps in 2011 to 27% in 2012. The enormous growth in retailer app share has come largely at the expense of Daily Deals, down in share from 20% in 2011 to 13% in 2012, and Online Marketplace apps, which contracted from 25% in 2011 to 20% in 2012. This suggests that retailers are beginning to better respond to the tectonic shift created by the collision of online- meeting offline-shopping through mobile apps.
Incoming! App & Mortar Fire
The opportunity for retailers to extend their relationship with consumers outside the store has never been greater, or more mission critical. Gone are the days when retailers should focus the majority of their marketing effort attracting consumers into stores, where 95% of all purchases take place. In the new mobile app economy, devices are always with you, always on and always connected. Consumers can be intercepted in store aisles and even on their way to the cash register. There are apps to scan an item, select size and color, and then have it shipped to your home - conveniently, quickly from the phone you have in your pocket right now. Apps are connected to credit cards and can have shipping info on file. In the new App & Mortar economy, they serve as virtual, portable show rooms that consumers can use to shop anytime, anywhere.
To keep dollars flowing through their cash registers, retailers need to re-examine the consumer relationship from the ground up and through the lens of mobile-first. In the App & Mortar economy, the battle for deeper consumer relationships is beginning. And there are already thousands of apps for that.
Posted by Peter Farago on Wed, Jan 02, 2013
The most important week of the year for app makers is the final week of the year, between Christmas and New Year's Day. Starting with Christmas Day, the largest single device activation day of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is marked by significantly elevated device activations and app downloads. This is the primary reason why companies jockey to rank well leading up to Christmas Day itself. This report reveals that the last week of 2012 was the largest week for both new device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history.
For this report, Flurry leverages its data-set from over 260,000 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 25% of all applications downloaded on a given day from the App Store and Google Play, 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 17.4 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day, along with an equally record-breaking 328 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 week, Flurry estimates that over 50 million iOS and Android devices were activated, and 1.76 billion applications were downloaded. Let’s take a closer look at 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 Tuesday to a Monday. As such, we take the average of the first Tuesday-to-Monday weeks in December to establish a baseline. The average downloads over these weeks were surprisingly even. The final week of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, grew by 65% over the early-December baseline, historically breaking through the largest single week record previously set during the same week of 2011. While several weeks since late November delivered billion+ week download levels, the holiday week delivered a record-shattering 1.7 billion downloads.
This second chart shows the top twenty countries across which the record 1.76 billion downloads were distributed. Starting from the left, the U.S. took the lion’s share with 604 million downloads, or 34.3%. Referencing an earlier report, wherein Flurry sized the installed base of top countries, it’s not surprising that the U.S. continues to lead the rest of the world, especially since the fast-closing second place China does not celebrate Christmas (only 3% of China’s population is Christian). Just before the holidays, Flurry estimated that there were 181 million active iOS and Android devices in the U.S. market, compared to 167 million in China.
Following the trend that Western countries more widely celebrate Christmas – note the higher positions of countries like Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Italy and Mexico in the chart – these countries over-indexed against largely non-Christian countries of China, South Korea and Japan. For example, while Japan and South Korea have the 4th and 5th largest smart device installed bases of all countries, they ranked 14th 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. Countries that significantly over-indexed during the holiday include Russia, Italy and Mexico which drove the top 7th, 8th and 9th most downloads despite the fact that their installed bases are ranked 13th, 14th and 15th, respectively.
Looking forward to 2013, Flurry expects the trend of one-billion-download weeks to become the norm, and that the industry will surpass the two-billion download week during Q4. Following a year where Google and Apple drove unprecedented adoption of mobile devices, Facebook declared itself a “mobile” company, and Amazon and Microsoft both made significant investments into mobile computing, we look forward to continued record-breaking adoption of smart devices and applications. Happy New Year from everyone at Flurry.
Posted by Peter Farago on Thu, Dec 27, 2012
More iOS and Android devices are activated on Christmas Day than on any other day of the year. This year was no exception. On this Christmas Day 2012, more iPhones, iPads, Galaxys, Kindle Fires, and more, were activated than on any other day in history. Moreover, as soon as we could tear the wrapping paper off our cool new devices, we started downloading a record volume of apps. Let’s get into the numbers.
How Did Santa Fit All Those Devices Into His Sleigh?
The chart below shows the number of new iOS and Android devices detected worldwide by Flurry on Christmas Day. With more than 260,000 apps using Flurry Analytics, Flurry detects over 90% 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.
In order to appreciate the magnitude 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 averaged around 4.0 million per day, with variance of a few hundred thousand in either direction per day. On Christmas Day, activations soared to more than 17.4 million, a 332% increase over the December baseline. By comparison, Christmas Day 2011 held the previous single-day record, having reached 6.8 million device activations. Christmas 2012 is more than 2.5 times larger than Christmas 2011, which surpassed its own baseline by more than 300%.
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.
More App Downloads Than Partridges in Pear Trees
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 112% on Christmas. Despite the ever-growing installed base of existing smart devices, the influx of new devices on Christmas Day still helped deliver a record download day, besting that of any previous day in history.
It Was Christmas All D*mn Day
For our next chart, we look at the distribution of downloads per hour across Christmas Day 2012. The shape of this curve looks like a table top, with downloads jumping early in the day to around 20 million per hour, when most of us were still in our pajamas, and remaining at this level for most of the day, even after the egg nog was gone. For perspective, we compare this to the average distribution of downloads per hour clocked between December 1 – 20.
More of Us Asked Santa for Tablets This Year
For our final chart, we drilled down into the split between smartphones versus tablets. While smartphone activations typically outpace that of tablets by 4:1, on Christmas Day 2012, more tablets were activated than smartphones. The big winners were Apple iPads, Apple iPad Minis and Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7” tablets. In particular, Amazon had a very strong performance in the tablet category, growing by several thousand percent over its baseline of tablet activations over the earlier part of December.
Over the next week, up through New Year’s Day, app download rates will remain significantly elevated. Flurry anticipates downloads to surpass more than 1.5 billion, and have a shot at breaking through the 2-billion download barrier for the first time ever. We look forward to accelerated growth in 2013, and continued success for developers.
Posted by Dan Laughlin on Thu, Dec 13, 2012
Apps are big business, and the biggest app business is games. In 2012, Flurry estimates revenue earned from apps will approach $10 billion, with games taking over 80% of the pie. The free-to-play business model (aka freemium), where consumers download and play the “core loop” of a game for free, but then pay for virtual goods and currency through micro-transactions, is the most prolific business model in the new era of digital distribution. When it comes to app consumption on iOS and Android smart devices, consumers spend over 40% of all their time using games.
The most successful companies in the new mobile economy, from Electronic Arts to Zynga and Mobage to Supercell, deeply understand consumer behavior differences by game genre. This level of understanding greatly informs a company’s app acquisition, retention and monetization strategies. In this report, Flurry examines the consumer behavior differences by app usage, retention and demographics for the top nine freemium game genres in mobile gaming. For this analysis, Flurry leveraged a sample of more than 300 million consumers using iOS and Android games each month. Please note that, for consistency, we include only free titles.
In the chart below, we lay out a “loyalty matrix” that plots the top nine freemium game categories by how often they’re used compared to how long consumers continue to use them over time. Specifically, we plot the 90-day retention rate of app categories on the x-axis against the frequency of use per week on the y-axis. We lay the “scatterplot” out in a Cartesian coordinate system with four quadrants.
Quadrant I represents a “sweet spot” for developers, whose games are used intensively by a set of highly retained users. Well-designed “appointment” mechanics drive frequency, as users are compelled to maintain and progress in their respective game. Social Turn-based games succeed in building an active, loyal user base by offering popular “evergreen” games played among friends. From a revenue perspective, while there exists significant potential to show advertising impressions to consumers who use so frequently, games in the Slots and Resource Management & Simulation (labeled as “Mgmt/Sim”) genres commonly monetize via in-app purchase. However, companies that maximize revenue in Quadrant I extract revenue from consumers willing to pay via in-app purchase, and then by showing ads to those who do not pay.
Quadrant II is characterized by the most intensive usage over a short customer lifecycle, and is occupied solely by the Strategy genre. This audience is demanding, game lifecycles are short and a game’s live services must be flawlessly executed. Successful Strategy game developers accelerate monetization by driving competition among players (“Player vs. Player”) and by encouraging fast game progress through premium currency spends. With frequency of use so high, users churn through content quickly. To maximize retention, developers must continuously release new content after the game’s initial launch.
Quadrant III also attracts a fickle gaming audience, but adds the challenge of having fewer opportunities per week to monetize the user. The well-documented success of the Card-Battle genre in Asia, and now Western markets, is even more impressive when considering the short time frame developers have to drive transactions. Targeted user acquisition is critical to avoid paying for large batches of users that will drop off quickly due to the “hardcore” nature of the content and game mechanics.
Quadrant IV features easy-to-play and highly repeatable games that can remain on a user’s “play list” for years. These evergreen titles may lack the depth required to generate sizeable in-app purchases, but do generate substantial advertising impressions over time. In addition to driving strong ad revenue, the large audience size of these games can be used to cross-promote a developer’s more narrowly focused, but better monetizing titles.
As the mobile app economy grows, the sophistication of its related advertising services will reach those found on the Internet today. Leveraging big data, the ability to target users based on demographics and personas, and then track the effectiveness of such targeting is just starting to take hold (Flurry has invested in this direction with its own services like Flurry AppCircle, an ad network, and Flurry Ad Analytics, an ad effectiveness solution). As developers and app marketing providers become more savvy, they can better acquire the kinds of users that will reliably play and pay in their apps. Below, using the same sample set of games, we look at the Age and Gender of users by genre.
A quick review shows that Quadrant I is largely comprised of middle-aged females that play games we know to have attractive retention and usage metrics.
Quadrant II shows that males are not extending into the same 40+ average age-range as female players. Casino / Poker games tend to attract older males the best.
Quadrant III is undoubtedly the hottest sector of the mobile gaming market, with young, male “core” gamers pausing their console gameplay sessions to increasingly play mobile games. These young men are difficult to corral, but can monetize at a rate that justifies the cost and effort of acquisition.
Quadrant IV shows younger females adopting games that feature more involved gameplay than those played by the middle-aged female crowd. While the youngest users enjoy the quick solo experience of the Endless genre, the late twenties / early thirties crowd are diving deeper into game mechanics and making it a social experience.
As mobile gaming rapidly matures, it is becoming increasingly difficult for new and small developers to succeed. The game quality bar has risen dramatically, user acquisition costs continue to climb and organic installs via app store discovery and featuring are harder to come by. One great equalizer for developers is the ability to collect and harness the power of data. In fact, game developers tend to be the “power users” of analytics, using sophisticated metrics to track user progress, tune gameplay and maximize monetization (a large part of Flurry Analytics' use base is game developers). In an industry that has historically been considered more artistic and subjective, connected devices and the ability to rapidly iterate on already shipped titles has ushered in an age of science and measurement. In short, data has enabled the “gamification” of the mobile industry.
Posted by Simon Khalaf on Wed, Dec 05, 2012
During the month of November, Flurry reached a major milestone, measuring more than a trillion unique events completed inside of mobile apps by consumers. The magnitude of this number, and what it means to an industry barely over four years old, that has already generated tens of billions of dollars, is unprecedented. An industry has shot up around Flurry in a way that no one, anywhere, could have imagined.
So it was against this backdrop that I began reading a series of differing investment theses written by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (What Has Changed), Dave McClure of 500 Startups (What Hasn’t Changed) and Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz (The Product Lens). The gist was about the cyclical nature of investing between consumer internet and enterprise companies, with another suggestion to focus on product over finances. The debate is entertaining, and not surprising. It validates a theory I’ve held since the mid-nineties about the fundamental difference between entrepreneurs and investors. Simply put, entrepreneurs focus on opportunity while investors focus on risk.
The venture industry wants familiarity, so it talks about consumer versus enterprise. The web comes with an understood set of metrics like page views, visits, unique users, returning visitors and bounce rates, to name a few. And there’s still a standard way of buying traffic (SEM) and getting traffic organically (SEO). There’s a clear index and path to the web, called Google, and most VCs understand Google economics. They understand the lifetime value vs. cost per acquisition equation. They can value businesses accordingly.
What the venture industry doesn’t yet understand is mobile and apps. Traffic acquisition is still an art more than a measurable science. No one has defined a set of metrics that the venture industry can use to universally compare the value of one app property to another, and business models on mobile are still new. On Sand Hill Road, the best line I hear is that “99 cents is the new free,” referring to the freemium model, but few truly understand what it means.
Mobile and apps are gobbling up the web and consumer Internet, and that’s where the opportunity is. And the opportunity has never been bigger. All around me, I see entrepreneurs living it, loving it and collecting it “99 cents” at a time. Meanwhile, the VCs are debating it.
Mobile App Growth: Measured by Flurry
In the month of November, we measured over a trillion events from over 250,000 applications created by more than 85,000 developers. Events are actions completed by consumers inside apps such as completing a game level, making a restaurant reservation or tagging a song. In November, we also measured over 60 billion sessions, which is the start and a stop of an application on a mobile smart device. The chart below shows the growth in events tracked since May of 2008, when we first made our analytics service available to developers. This growth reflects the growth of the app economy.
Mobile Apps: Dominating the Web and Challenging Television
The chart below updates Flurry’s analysis comparing time spent in mobile apps on smartphones and tablets to time spent on the web using a browser. For web usage on desktops, laptops and smart devices, we build a model using publicly available data from comScore and Alexa. For mobile applications, we use Flurry Analytics data, now gathering data from over 250,000 applications. This time around, we add time spent on television using data released by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2010 and 2011. Note that the bureau hasn’t yet released their 2012 numbers, but given the maturity of the TV market, we assume that time spent on TV is flat year-over-year.
Between December 2011 and December 2012, the average time spent inside mobile apps by a U.S. consumer grew 35%, from 94 minutes to 127 minutes. By comparison, the average time spent on the web declined 2.4%, from 72 minutes to 70 minutes. By our measurement, U.S. consumers are spending 1.8 times more time in apps than on the web.
The chart also shows that time spent in apps already totals 76% of time spent on television. With new content released via thousands of new apps each day, we expect this trend to continue. In fact, we ultimately expect apps on tablets and smartphones to challenge broadcast television as the dominant channel for media consumption. Compared to the 60-year-old television industry, apps are just over 4 years old. In particular, tablets will drive growth in app consumption in 2013 as TV-style content and major programming moves to the tablet. Most TV Networks have already adjusted to a dual screen world and are synchronizing their TV content with their tablet app content. We believe that, with the introduction of connected TVs, TV shows will behave like apps.
Media, Games and Entertainment: The 80/20 Rule
Finally, we measured the time spent using mobile apps per app category across iOS and Android smart devices. For this comparison, we use Flurry data over the month of November 2012 as a baseline, and then adjust based on Flurry’s penetration per category. The chart below shows that 80% of the total time spent is across gaming, social networking and entertainment categories.
The stats on gaming are particularly interesting. Returning to the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey data, the average U.S. consumer spent 1.2 hours (72 minutes) per day playing a game, on any platform. Our data shows that 43% of time spent in mobile apps, 55 minutes, is spent in games. This means that mobile gaming on tablets and smartphones has absorbed 76% (55 of the 72 minutes) of the total time consumers spend on gaming, anywhere. Now, that's disruptive.
In just 4 years, mobile apps have overtaken the web and are beginning to challenge television, the top media channel. As we enter 2013, the app industry shows no signs of slowing. On the contrary, we continue to see a strong flow of new devices and new apps activated in our network. While VCs debate what part of the investment cycle we’re in and how to manage risk, all entrepreneurs need to know - from one entrepreuneur to another - is that you're witnessing the opportunity of a lifetime.
Posted by Peter Farago on Wed, Nov 28, 2012
Marshall McLuhan popularized the idea of the “global village” in the 1960s through his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of the Typographic Man and Understanding Media. McLuhan, who is credited with predicting the concept of the Internet decades before it actually existed, described the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time, enabled by electric technology. The result is that the globe contracts into a village.
Post-Internet, the explosive adoption of iOS and Android smart devices best extends his theory. Enabled by this new computer-mediated platform is the distribution of apps, from every quarter to every point, at the same time. Consider that in the United States today, right now, teams from Finland, Japan, Israel and the UK share top grossing positions alongside U.S. teams in the iTunes App Store and Google Play. Today, in the top Chinese app stores, one can find American, French and Japanese companies alongside Chinese companies for a top share of revenue. And in the top UK app stores, companies from Serbia, Finland, Japan, China and the U.S. are counted among local UK companies as top revenue generators.
Welcome to the new global village built on a foundation, per Flurry’s count, of three quarters of a billion active iOS and Android smart devices, simultaneously running across more than 220 countries and territories that will generate revenue approaching $10 billion in 2012. This report focuses on the further shrinking of the global village, driven by the prolific spread of global smart devices over the last 12 months. We show which countries have the largest active smart device installed bases, are experiencing the fastest growth and how the distribution of app usage is shifting to become increasingly international. For its analysis, Flurry uses data from more than 250,000 applications that it tracks, running on more than 750 million devices worldwide. With its application coverage, Flurry estimates that it can reliably detect over 90% of all iOS and Android devices active in the world during a given month.
Let’s start by looking at which countries make up the world’s largest app markets.
The chart above shows the top markets by their active iOS and Android user bases during October 2012. The US and China tower over the next group of top markets by at least five times. And while the U.S. has added a whopping 55 million net active devices since October 2011, China has added a dizzying 125 million, a figure that totals the sum of the UK, Japan and South Korea’s combined, current active user base. Flurry predicts that China will surpass the U.S. in total installed base by the end of Q1 2013, delayed only by the upcoming massive holiday season that will spike the U.S. installed base.
The chart above shows the growth in active devices per country between October 2011 and October 2012. China leads the world with an impressive 293% year-over-year growth rate, spurred by the potent combination of its vast population and rapidly growing middle class. For this chart, Flurry selected countries that had a minimum of a half a million active devices as of October 2011. Compared to prior Flurry international growth studies, we note that a new set of fast-growers has now entered the top 10 including Colombia, Ukraine, Venezuela and the Philippines, further demonstrating the shrinking global village.
Lastly, we look at the volume of application usage across the globe tracked by Flurry, which we estimate comprise of approximately one fifth of all worldwide app sessions on iOS and Android, the world’s largest cross-platform sample. Year-over-year app sessions in the U.S. declined as a proportion of WW sessions between October 2011 and October 2012, from 48% to 29%. The balance of the top 10 (ranks 2 -9) grew from 27% in October 2011 to 39% in October 2012. The rest of the world also made gains from 25% in October 2011 to 32% in October 2012. In total, 71% of all app sessions now take place outside the U.S.
Over the last century, the distribution of the world’s information has migrated from print (e.g., books and newspapers) to mass media (e.g., radio and television) to computer-mediated media (i.e., the Internet). Over just the last five years, however, we’ve taken the most significant step forward in the evolution of media distribution with the unprecedented adoption of smartphones and tablets: portable, broadband-connected super computers connected to The Cloud. Applying McLuhan’s point of view that “the message is the media,” apps are the new message.
Posted by Peter Farago on Mon, Oct 29, 2012
While smartphones have reached critical mass, tablets are poised to do the same soon. As a form factor, tablets simultaneously take a step toward the living room and the workplace. For consumers, these devices are multimedia machines, offering a glimpse into how consumers might one day accept connected television. For workers, IT departments are already reacting to the “Bring Your Own Device” wave changing the modern workforce. According to Forrester, 12% of workers already use a tablet at work.
The stakes are high. According to its latest earnings call, more than one out of every three Apple smart devices sold during the last quarter was a tablet, 14 million iPads versus about 27 million iPhones. And with the announcement of the lower-priced iPad mini, more directly competing with Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD, Google’s Nexus 7 and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 2, we anticipate this ratio to increase more toward tablets during the holiday season.
This report focuses on how consumer demographics and behavior vary between smartphones and tablets. Taking a snapshot in September 2012 from Flurry Analytics, that totaled more than 6 billion application sessions across approximately 500 million smart devices, Flurry provides a comprehensive comparison between smartphones and tablets, spanning age, gender, time of day usage, category usage and engagement metrics. For age and gender comparisons, Flurry leverages a panel of more than 30 million consumers who have opted-in to share demographic data.
The chart above shows the distribution of age for smartphone versus tablet users across traditional age groupings (aka “age breaks”). The blue bars represent smartphone consumers and greens bars represent tablet consumers. Each group of same-colored bars totals 100%. On average, smartphone users are younger than tablet users, 30 versus 34 years of age. Nearly three quarters of smartphone users are 34 years of age or younger, while more than two thirds of tablet user are 25 years or older. Additionally, recent research from the OPA conducted by Frank N. Magid and Associates indicates that household incomes for tablet owners are becoming increasingly affluent, with 59% of household incomes for tablet owners surpassing $50,000 versus the U.S. average of 41% households with incomes over $50,000.
The pie charts above compare the gender split between smartphone and tablet users, with women shown in dark pink and men shown in blue. While smartphone usage trends slightly more male, tablet usage is nearly even. Traditionally, males adopt technology devices more than women. With an even gender split for tablets, this bucks the trend, indicating that tablets likely have more long-term mass-market appeal.
The chart above shows how consumers allocate their time using apps across a day, also called “dayparting.” Smartphone app usage is indicated with the blue line, and tablet app usage with the green line. Each line spans 24 hours of a day and totals 100% usage across the day. Studying the chart, tablets have a greater spike of usage during the prime-time television window, from 7 pm to 10 pm, whereas smartphone usage is more evenly distributed throughout the day. This would indicate that tablets are more often used alongside, or instead of television viewing than smartphones. In an earlier study, Flurry compared the combined usage of tablet and smartphone apps versus the Internet and television.
The chart above compares the time spent across app categories between smartphones and tablets. At a high level, consumers spend more time using tablets for media and entertainment, including Games (67%), Entertainment (9%) and News (2%) categories which account for nearly four-fifths of consumption on tablets. Smartphones claim a higher proportion of communication and task-oriented activities with Social Networking (24%), Utilities (17%), Health & Fitness (3%) and Lifestyle (3%) commanding nearly half of all usage on smartphones. Games are the most popular category on both form factors with 67% of time spent using games on tablets and 39% of time spent using games on smartphones. Further reinforcing that tablets are “media machines” is the fact that consumers spend 71% more of their time using games on tablets than they spend doing so on smartphones.
Finally, we compare engagement metrics between smartphones and tablets. On average, consumers use apps on smartphones more frequently but for shorter periods of time. With consumers using tablets more for media consumption, and during the evenings, this stands to reason. Conversely, consumers use their smartphones for shorter periods of time across more sessions over the course of a day to complete tasks like checking into social networks and using utility apps.
The Battle for the Living Room
Studying smartphone versus tablet usage differences not only provides insight into how developers should consider form factor when designing app experiences, but also how digital distribution could disrupt the living room. As we imagine a world of connected TVs, tablet usage gives us the best current-day hint of that world to come. Tablet users are older, more female, and we can surmise, more affluent. Additionally, they use more during the evenings and for longer sessions. Finally they consume more media and entertainment experiences, with a significant proportion spent on games. In particular, this would indicate that as Apple and Google enter the living room with connected TV initiatives, game consoles made by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would experience the greatest competition. The distribution of content into the living room may also significantly change for network and cable television content providers. In summary, the impact of smart devices on both work and play are profound. With a bevy of significant companies vying for tablet hegemony, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Samsung, developers and consumers should expect nothing short of tremendous innovation.
A Note about Engagement Metrics in this Study versus Previous Flurry Studies
Please note that in previous studies, Flurry combined all smartphone and tablet usage to generate total time spent by the average “smart device” user in a given day. Using the stats provided in this study, a clever reader could back into a comparison to that study. However, breaking out time spent per day using the metrics included in this study (by taking ‘number of sessions per week’ multiplied by ‘time per session’ then dividing by seven days to get to a daily figure) will not simply add up to the total ‘time spent per day’ provided in previous studies. This is because individual users of smartphones and tablets spread their total usage time across multiple devices. By separating out smartphone and tablet usage for this study, the overlap of users who have more than one device is not taken into account. In short, these two studies do not provide an apples-to-apples comparison.
Posted by Peter Farago on Mon, Oct 22, 2012
Regardless of a company’s earlier success, thriving in the new mobile app economy depends on engagement and retention. After acquiring users, the real battle to keep and ultimately monetize consumers begins. In the brave new world of “mobile first,” engagement is the new battleground.
This research is a redux to one of Flurry’s most popular reports, entitled Mobile Apps: Money, Models and Loyalty. Released three years ago, the initial report organized app category usage into a loyalty matrix. We do the same again now, while also acknowledging that a lot has changed in the app economy since then. To start, there is an order of magnitude more available apps in the App Store, now brimming with over 700,000 app choices for consumers. We are three generations beyond the then-new iPhone 3GS. We have since met the iPad, and perhaps tomorrow will meet the iPad Mini.
Combined, smart devices – iOS and Android smartphones and tablets – are the fastest adopted technology in history; adopted faster than electricity, televisions, microwaves, personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, dishwashers, stoves, and a whole lot more. Last month, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook – the number two most visited website on the web – declared “we are now a mobile company” explaining that “you just could do so much better by doing native [application] work” versus using languages like HTML5 on top of browsers. Each month, approximately 600 million of Facebook’s 1 billion monthly active users already accesses Facebook via mobile.
Know Thyself
Each app category has different user engagement and loyalty characteristics. Understanding a given app audience based on the category to which it belongs can inform a company’s app acquisition, retention and monetization strategies. For this analysis, we use a sample of apps used more than 1.7 billion times each week. In total, more than 80,000 companies use Flurry Analytics across more than 230,000 apps to understand consumer behavior and improve their apps.
The above matrix plots application categories by how often they’re used compared to how long consumers continue to use them over time. Specifically, we plot the 90-day retention rate of app categories on the x-axis against the frequency of use per week on the y-axis. We lay the “scatterplot” out in a Cartesian coordinate system with four quadrants. For our categories, we started by taking the application categories defined by Apple in the App Store. In cases where a cluster of applications within a parent category showed meaningful usage differences, we created a sub-category. For example, Flurry divides games into Social Games and Single Player Games given how differently consumers use these sub-categories.
Quadrant I includes apps that are used intensively and to which consumers are loyal over time. News and Communication apps are the two categories that appear in this category. On average, because these apps tend to have stable, growing audiences, they are best positioned to generate advertising revenue or charge a subscription. Consumers perceive these apps to deliver enduring value over time.
Quadrant II is comprised of apps that are used intensively, but for finite periods of time. They are perceived by consumers to deliver value in bursts. Streaming Music, Dating and Social Games best typify this quadrant. Consider for a moment why Dating is a category that appears in this quadrant. For most people, we can assume that finding a long-term “significant other” is the ultimate goal of dating. As a result, the app maker should expect customer churn. While usage may be high during the time when a consumer looks for a suitable partner, once that person is found, usage stops. An implication could be that to maintain a growing audience, apps in this category require heavy, constant acquisition to find consumers who are “in the market” for dating. Ironically, the better the app is at match making, the more churn it should expect.
Quadrant III contains apps that are used infrequently and have high churn. They contain the most “one-and-dones.” Personalization is an example that makes sense for this quadrant, since a consumer uses this app to change her screen saver or select a theme for her operating system. Once this set-up is complete, it’s unlikely that the user will need to re-use this application. Since the app’s value is diminished almost immediately, applications with this kind of usage pattern are best served with premium pricing models; that is, charging the consumer before providing access to the content.
Quadrant IV is made up of apps that are used infrequently but deliver very high value when used. Even though they’re used only occasionally, these apps can remain on a consumer's handset almost indefinitely. For example, consider how useful an airline, hotel or rental car-booking app is to a business traveler. While the app remains unused between business trips, its value spikes as soon as the next business trip needs to be scheduled.
Which Pill to Take
The quadrant an app falls into can help the content creator decide what business model is best. On average, Quadrants I and IV (the right-hand side) are better suited to subscription and advertising-supported models. The main reason is that these apps have perceived enduring value by consumers over a long period of time, and therefore more successfully retain their user bases. For ad-supported apps, high repeat usage translates into more ad impressions served. Categories on the left-hand side, Quadrants II and III, are better suited for one-time download fees. Additionally, quadrants II and IV (top left and bottom right) are likely best for in-app purchase models. For Quadrant II, the intense usage means that consumers find very high value during a short window. This creates the opportunity to offer new content or functionality during “binge” usage. Adroit social game makers are masters at driving in-app purchases during a consumer’s greatest moment of engagement. For Quadrant IV, because the user will return again and again, there also exists the possibility to find new ways of increasing value, which includes offering add-on functionality or content for a fee.
For more data, the table below provides 30, 60 and 90-day retention rates as well as weekly frequency of use numbers. Note that some of the categories included in the table below are not included in the matrix chart above.
Compared to Flurry’s 2009 analysis, 90-day retention rates have increased from 25% to 35%. Additionally, frequency of use has decreased from 6.7 in 2009 to an average of 3.7 now. We attribute increased retention rates to increased quality in the market, driven by more competition. With tens of thousands of more companies building apps and hundreds of thousands of more available apps, the quality of apps has risen dramatically. Simply put, app makers are getting better at holding a consumer's attention longer. Additionally, we believe usage rates are lower because consumers have more choice than ever and are splitting their time across more applications. While Flurry included 19 categories in its 2009 report, we now include 30 distinct categories as the industry has matured and more distinct verticals have appeared.
Brave New World
With more than a billion smartphones and tablets now in use, as well as the eventual move of apps into the living room through connected TV efforts by the likes of Apple and Google, digital distribution is changing the way the world does business. No matter what category your app belongs to, understanding and improving user engagement is the new currency of doing business in the new digital world.
Posted by Peter Farago on Mon, Aug 27, 2012
The rate of iOS and Android device adoption has surpassed that of any consumer technology in history. Compared to recent technologies, smart device adoption is being adopted 10X faster than that of the 80s PC revolution, 2X faster than that of 90s Internet Boom and 3X faster than that of recent social network adoption. Five years into the smart device growth curve, expansion of this new technology is rapidly expanding beyond early adopter markets such as such as North America and Western Europe, creating a true worldwide addressable market. Overall, Flurry estimates that there were over 640 million iOS and Android devices in use during the month of July 2012.
This report reveals which countries have the largest active smart device installed bases, are experiencing the fastest growth and are most penetrated. We also show how the distribution of app usage is shifting to become increasingly international. For this report, Flurry uses data from more than 200,000 applications that it tracks, running on more than 640 million devices worldwide. With its application coverage, Flurry estimates that it can reliably detect over 90% of all iOS and Android devices active in the world during a given month. Let’s start by looking at which countries make up the world’s largest app markets.
Compared to July 2011, the United States and China continue controlling the top two spots, with China dramatically closing the gap on the United States. Year-over-year, Flurry calculates that net active devices in the U.S. grew by approximately 30 million, while China saw more than 100 million new active devices enter the market. At this rate, China’s active installed base could overtake the United States as early as the 2012 Holiday season. Please note that Flurry detects actual active devices upon which apps are running, and that these numbers will differ than reported hardware sales by OEMs. Compared to last year, 9 of the top 10 countries remain unchanged, excepting Brazil, which pushes Australia just out of the top 10, into the 11th position.
The chart above shows the growth in active devices per country between July 2011 and July 2012. China leads the world with an astounding 401% year-over-year growth, demonstrating the power of the country’s vast population coupled with its rapidly growing middle class. Notably, all four BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are represented in the top 10-ten growth countries for smart devices, reinforcing their new stage of advanced economic development. For this chart, Flurry selected countries that had a minimum of a half a million active devices as of July 2011.
In addition to the fastest growing countries, Flurry also measured which markets are mostly rapidly nearing saturation. Specifically, we compared the number of active devices in each country relative to its adult population, between ages 15 and 64 years old. While Singapore, Hong Kong and Sweden form the top three countries in terms of smart device penetration, indicating their strong consumer technology economies, each country has a relatively small total population, ranging between 5 to 10 million. By comparison, the United States, the fifth most penetrated country with 78% of its adult population using smart devices, has a total population of more than 310 million. South Korea and the United Kingdom have the 2nd and 3rd largest populations among the top 10 penetrated markets, with roughly 50 million and 60 million respectively.
Finally, we look at look at the volume of application usage across the globe tracked by Flurry, which we estimate comprise of approximately one fifth of all worldwide app sessions on iOS and Android, the world’s largest cross-platform sample. Year-over-year app sessions in the U.S. declined as a proportion of WW sessions between July 2011 and July 2012, from roughly one-half to a little over one-third. The balance of the top 10 (ranks 2 -9) grew from 27% in July 2011 to 36% in July 2012. The rest of the world also made gains from 21% in 2011 to 28% in 2012. In total, 64% of all app sessions now take place outside the U.S.
Enabled by digital distribution across the unprecedented growing base of iOS and Android smart devices, global software distribution has never been so frictionless. After building an application, a development team can distribute its app on Android instantaneously and, after review by Apple, can be in the App Store within roughly one week. With international growth accelerating, there has never been a better time, in the history of technology, to be a software developer.
Posted by Peter Farago on Tue, Jul 31, 2012
The iTunes App Store and Google Play now offer more than 600,000 apps each. And Apple’s most recent earnings call revealed that the company has paid out more than $5.5 billion to developers since the launch of the App Store. With unprecedented consumer adoption of iOS and Android devices, low barriers to entry for developers and throngs of paying customers, Apple and Google have created massive economic opportunities for developers.
In particular, iOS and Android have made it possible for independent developers and mobile app start-ups to thrive. As industries mature, however, we expect established players and brands to invade from other platforms, depressing opportunities for many early entrants. Along with this, we expect to see market revenue concentrate among fewer larger players. For this report, with these typical patterns in mind, Flurry modeled worldwide mobile app revenue, revenue sources and revenue concentration among top-ranked mobile apps on iOS and Android. For this report, we used data from over 200,000 mobile applications in the Flurry Analytics data set. Let’s start with market growth.
The chart above compares worldwide revenue generated by iOS and Android apps in 2011 vs. 2012. For 2012, we modeled the first half of the year based on actual data, and then applied growth rates to estimate the rest of the year based on the proportion of revenue observed in 2011 between the first and second half of that year. In 2011, Flurry calculates that iOS and Android applications generated a total of $5.4 billion across premium, in-app purchase and advertising revenue. Advertising made up 18% of the revenue. In 2012, Flurry forecasts that revenue will grow by 60% over the previous year, reaching $8.7 billion. Advertising is the fastest growing revenue category with growth forecasted at more than 100%, from $980 million in 2011 to $2 billion in 2012, delivering 23% of 2012 total revenue. Likewise, premium and in-app purchase revenue is also increasing at a rate of 50%, from $4.5 billion in 2011 to $6.7 billion in 2012.
Next, we look at the concentration of revenue among top ranked apps from 2010 to 2012. Please note that for this analysis, we focus on premium and in-app revenue only, excluding ad revenue. Comparing these two years shows how dramatically the distribution of revenue is shifting across the long tail. Starting on the left, in 2010, the green part of the column shows that 28% of revenue was generated by the Top 25 ranked titles on iOS and Android. In 2012, we estimate that the Top 25 will drop to commanding about half of total revenue, or 15%. Likewise, comparing the grey sections of each column, the rest of the Top 100 apps will drop from earning 27% of revenue in 2010 to 17% of revenue in 2012. Conversely, revenue generated by the long tail significantly grows from 2010 to 2012. Comparing the blue sections, any apps ranked beyond the top 100, we observe that long tail revenue explodes from earning under half of all premium and in-app purchase revenue in 2010 to over two-thirds in 2012.
Finally, we rank the revenue generated by each of the top 100 positions across the iTunes App Store and Google Play. For each year, we set the revenue generated by the top spot at 100%. Then, relative to the top spot, we take the percent each position generates from the 2nd rank all the way through the 100th. By normalizing each curve in this way, we can compare the relative revenue generated per ranked position in the top 100 per year. For example, we can see whether ranking number 50 generates more relative revenue in 2012 versus 2010. Most interestingly, this kind of analysis shows whether the developer “middle class” is better off today than its “parents’” generation.
Now that we have relative earning power mapped per ranked position, we can study the heights and shapes of the curves. Comparing 2010, the green curve, to 2012, the blue curve, we notice that two things are happening simultaneously. First, each position in the top 100 is more valuable now, which makes sense because the market has grown overall. Second, the blue 2012 curve is flatter. Unlike the green 2010 curve, which steeply drops during the top 10 ranked positions, indicating the wealth is more concentrated at the top, the blue 2012 curve stabilizes shortly after the top 5 positions and then maintains a high, gently sloping plateau all the way through the 80th position, where it then settles just above the green curve, ostensibly continuing to “fly” at an altitude higher than that of the green curve out across the long tail. In short, this means that the middle class has more earning power, taking a substantial share of total wealth in the economy.
With the app economy booming, companies like Facebook, Twitter and Zynga are under tremendous pressure from investors to seize the opportunity presented by this new platform. However, with software delivered in the form of downloadable applications, unguaranteed network connectivity, different consumer behavior and control exerted by platform providers such as Apple and Google, the mobile app landscape creates different, meaningful challenges for companies attempting to enter the app space from other platforms. Combined with a marketplace that reduces the power of brand recognition (e.g., apps are free for consumers to try risk free), market wealth unexpectedly continues to shift to the long tail, funding continued R&D, advertising budgets and other activities that increase their competitive strength. The age of middle-class app developer has arrived. In this economy not only are the rich getting richer, but so too are the poor, and gaining on the rich.