State of Mobile 2022

App Annie released a report named State of Mobile 2022, offering a comprehensive view on the app economy around the world. The report is very informative with lots of data and I really recommend you have a look, but there are a couple of things that make me hesitant to draw any lesson:

• Hours spent on app is only on Android devices; which doesn’t provide a complete picture of app usage as iOS is a huge ecosystem
• I couldn’t find the definition of breakout downloads anywhere in the report. What does breakout even mean?
• We need to be careful about the number of downloads. I suspect these downloads needed to be in 2021 to be included in this report. That means some popular apps that are on consumer phones before 2021 aren’t. Hence, the number of downloads in 2021 doesn’t paint a true picture of how popular apps are

With that being said, here are some takeaways in which I have some confidence.

Total App Spend in 2021 was $170 billion, implying iOS’ has a market share of 35-40%

App Annie estimated that the total app spend in 2021 at $170 billion. On Monday, Apple revealed that they paid $60 billion to developers in 2021 which didn’t include Apple’s commissions. If we assume that Apple takes 15% on every dollar, the total app spend on the App Store would be around $70 billion ~ 40% of the figure that App Annie reported.

Though their population isn’t too far off from each other, China had much more app downloads in 2021 than India

China has approximately 1.4 billion people in population, 20 million more than what India has. However, the number of app downloads in China easily dwarfs that in India and the rest of the world. I wonder if it’s because folks in China cycle their phones more often so that the number of downloads was high even though the number of users didn’t necessarily increase. On a side note, shout out to Vietnam with more than 3 billion downloads for a country with 97 million people.

LinkedIn was frequently searched on the App Store, signaling a vibrant job market

Zoom, Teams and LinkedIn are in the top most searched keywords on the App Store. That’s heartening for Zoom and Microsoft investors because this signals their brand awareness among users. The fact that LinkedIn is among this group signals to me that folks want to update their profile and look for job opportunities. Why else would you look for the LinkedIn app?

45% of markets where Disney+ is available have over 1 million downloads in total. The figure for Netflix is 31%

According to App Annie, there are 24 countries where the number of total downloads for Disney+ exceeded 1 million while there are 58 such countries for Netflix. However, it’s really important to remember that Disney+ is only available in 53 markets whereas Netflix can be downloaded in more than 190. Hence, you can see Disney+ tends to be really popular wherever it’s available.