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You've been using an awful lot of shopping apps lately
Year-end mobile use statistics are usually pretty predictable, at least in terms of overall growth -- Spoiler Alert: It goes up every year -- but 2014 was actually somewhat surprising, if Yahoo's Flurry analytics is to be believed. According to the company's data, the biggest app growth category was Lifestyle & Shopping, which grew an astounding 174%, year-over-year. Other notable big movers include Utilities & Productivity which grew 121%, Messaging at 103%, and Health & Fitness with 89% growth. Games -- which have long been a main source of revenue in the App Store -- grew the least of all, with just a 30% bump over the previous year. Of course, as app gaming is already a massive market on its own it could be argued that there's not that much more room left to expand each year, while shopping apps clearly had plenty of room to grow.
iOS commands 14% of market share in Samsung's home country
Industry analysis firm Flurry has disclosed a fascinating little morsel of information: in South Korea, the home of Samsung, Apple's iOS devices account for one out of seven -- 14 percent -- of all mobile devices used in the country. Why is that number so surprising? South Korean manufacturers have long had an advantage in their home country, and even now Samsung tops the market with 60 percent of all smartphones and tablets sold in the country. Two other Android device manufacturers based in South Korea -- LG and Pantech -- account for another 25 percent of the market. Apple comes in at 14 percent, while all other Android manufacturers account for just a tiny 1 percent sliver of the market. Flurry's data show some other interesting facts. The company found that phablets -- larger than a smartphone, but smaller than most tablets -- were quite popular in South Korea, accounting for 41 percent of device sales. In the rest of the world, phablets only make up 7 percent of the market. [via Apple Insider]
Report: Customer retention is a major factor for the App Store
Yes, the conclusion of this report might be a little obvious to anyone who's been following the App Store closely, but it's true: Flurry's latest writeup of App Store stats suggests that keeping users playing a game or using an app can be a major factor in that app's success. Flurry filed the apps it follows into a set of four categories, based on star systems. Black Holes feature low amounts of monthly users, and low amounts of retention over a couple 30-day periods. Shooting Stars have put a lot of users together quickly, with high user numbers, but relatively low retention. Red Dwarfs have lots of user retention, but low numbers overall -- these are cult favorites, used by a smaller amount of very loyal people. And finally, Supernovas have it all, in Flurry's estimation: Lots of users that stay with the app for quite a while. When you take those categories over to the average number of minutes of usage per month (in the chart above), then things get really interesting: As you can see, the more retention an app has, the more engaged its users are (and whether you're talking about premium apps or apps that use in-app purchases, more engagement usually means more money made). So this is where Flurry gets its conclusion: User retention is extremely important. Even if an app doesn't take off right away in terms of user numbers (if it's not a Shooting Star, with a lot of users who don't stick around), keeping those users over a longer period grows the user base and that user base stays loyal over time. In the past, a lot of developers have aimed for that Shooting Star status -- they push on big launches, and try to put a huge number of users together very quickly after an app's release. But this report shows that there's another market on the App Store, one that moves a little more slowly (and doesn't collect as many users as quickly), but that can become very large and engaged indeed, sometimes over a matter of months or even years.
WSJ: Apple's App Store climbs towards $25 billion in sales
The Wall Street Journal has posted an article covering the meteoric rise of the App Store, from its inception just a few years ago to its current state of almost $25 billion in annual sales. But while the App Store is growing like crazy, it's also presenting more problems for developers as well: Finding a significant crowd of customers is getting tougher and tougher, and just making a name for yourself in such a huge market isn't always easy. And it doesn't help that customers are flying through apps extremely quickly. Mobile analytics firm Flurry tells the WSJ that while users do now spend about two hours a day on apps, the apps they use don't stick around for very long. About 63 percent of the apps in use today weren't used daily a year ago, and most customers focus on about eight apps at a time, according to the research. That makes sense. In such a huge market, with so many apps to try, why focus on just a few? But it also means that the app market is going to have to mature. The WSJ cites ESPN for shuttering one of its apps while focusing on the more popular ScoreCenter utility, and they also mention Shazam, an app that has found all sorts of functionality (and more revenue streams) as it has matured in the App Store. Apple's App Store marketplace has gone from zero to billions in just the past few years, and no one's got an exact road map for where it's headed next.
App downloads hit 1.76 billion during holiday week
With so many new smartphones and tablets in use thanks to holiday gifting, it follows that app download rates are typically elevated between Christmas Day and the first day of the new year, but 2012 was a special year. Flurry reports that between December 25 and December 31, a whopping 1.76 billion apps were downloaded on iOS and Android devices, which just happens to be a new weekly sales record. The weekly average for the beginning of December stood at 1.07 billion, making the final week of the year 65 percent more lucrative for app sellers. For comparison, the last seven days of 2011 saw sales peak at 1.2 billion. As far as countries go, the biggest app download hotspot is the US, followed by China, the UK, Germany and France. The United States alone was responsible for over 600 million downloads in the final week of 2012. [Via: GigaOM]
Flurry: Santa crammed more tablets than smartphones into Christmas stockings
Assuming you were a non-naughty-lister who didn't get the proverbial coal lump, it looks like that gift under the tree was more likely a tablet than a phone this Noël, according to Flurry. The analytics outfit said that just over half of December 25th activations were slates, and we can't imagine too many gift-getters letting their new devices simlessly fester in a box over the big day. Overall activations more than doubled from last Christmas, and were up 332 percent on that single day from the first 20 days of December, combined. As might be expected, Apple came up big with iPad sales, but Flurry said that Amazon was also a winner with its 7-inch Kindle Fire HD tab, showing a "several thousand percent" increase over baseline activations. None of this likely comes as a huge shock to our readers, who rather overwhelmingly said that they'd rather have a Nexus 7 tablet than a pricier RAZR M as a gift if they toiled at Google.
Flurry: 17 million iOS, Android devices activated on Christmas Day
If you received a new smartphone or tablet for Christmas, you're not alone; VentureBeat reports that over 17 million new iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas day, according to analytics firm Flurry. That's a bump of over 330 percent over the average of the 20 days preceding the biggest gift-giving day of the year. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that while tablets accounted for just 20 percent of the activations between December 1-20, Christmas Day saw tablets take over, with 51 percent of new device activations coming from slates. As you might expect, the skyrocketing device statistics also helped to bump app download rates, with roughly 20 million downloads tallied each hour for the majority of Christmas Day. [Via: VentureBeat]
Tablet and smartphone use detailed by age group, gender
In an effort to better understand the growing tablet and smartphone markets, Flurry Analytics studied over 30 million consumers to paint a picture of just who is utilizing the devices, and for what purpose. Some of the takeaways fall in line with what you might expect: The 25-34 age group dominates both smartphone and tablet use, gadget owners are more likely to use their devices between 7 PM and 11 PM, etc. But there are also a few more interesting tidbits. For example, while the age spread of smartphone ownership peaks between 25 and 34 and falls sharply as age progresses, tablet ownership is much more spread out. The average age of a tablet owner is 34 years, but the 35-54 age bracket still accounts for 24 percent of the overall total. Those in the 55-plus group make up 17 percent of the total, which is quite large when compared to the 7 percent of overall smartphone owners in that same age bracket. Another somewhat surprising statistic is the amount of time people spend playing games on their tablets. Of all the ways those surveyed use their devices, tablet owners played games 67 percent of the time they picked up their slates. This is compared to smartphone owners who played games 39 percent of the time they were using their handsets. Flurry also found that while tablets were used less often when compared to smartphones, the amount of time spent using the device each session beat out that of its smaller counterpart. You can check out the full breakdown of results on Flurry's blog, and then let us know if you see any glaring abnormalities when compared to your own experiences.
Flurry details app retention by app category, users love weather apps
Flurry has looked at app engagement and retention with its great series of reports on app usage, and the company has now returned to the subject in a new release. This time, the mobile advertising firm looks at app retention within certain categories to see which kinds of apps users are able to find easily, keep and engage with them. The results are pretty much what you'd expect: Weather and news apps are able to keep users for a long period of time, because most users choose one they trust and then stick with it. In terms of frequency, I'm not surprised to see streaming music apps listed high: Lately, the Slacker Radio app is probably the most used on my iPhone 5. Social games and social messaging apps are also used frequently, showing that people are most engaged when their friends are as well. On the other side of the spectrum, you can see that music apps tend not to keep users around for long. I'd guess that's because Apple's own music apps are probably what most people end up going back to. Health and fitness apps are also down there, and retail and deals apps are also in that lower quadrant. That's also not too shocking. Most people interested in retail apps or deals probably use them until they buy what they need, and then move on. These are just general comparisons of categories. Not all weather apps command high retention, and there are some health apps that get used all the time. But it is interesting to have a big picture of which categories are being used more often on iOS.
iOS and Android make for fastest tech adoption ever
Mobile marketing and analytics firm Flurry has another great research post up, this time about the speed of adoption for both iOS and Android. This one goes a little far into comparing apples and oranges, so to speak, but it's still interesting. Flurry notes that both iOS and Android app usages has blown up in the last few years, so much so that it's seeing traffic increases of over a few hundred percent from the past year in places like China, Brazil, and Chile. Flurry now estimates that there are over 640 million iOS and Android devices running apps worldwide, and given the huge growth of that number, as well as the big numbers behind app and data usage on those devices, these smartphones are being adopted by users "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." Unfortunately, Flurry doesn't share the exact numbers behind those stats (not to mention that it's hard to compare numbers like that anyway, given how tough it is to calculate in numbers what a "revolution" in the tech sense actually means). But the point is clear: The current smartphone growth is a huge movement in the tech industry, and is taking place on a much faster and larger scale than ever before.
Activision starts mobile publishing initiative for indies
Activision, the "that's no moon" of publishers, has created a strategic relationship with mobile platform and analytic company Flurry Inc. to publish indie titles. Actually, it's to "identify and assist third-party developers in the development, publishing, distribution and promotion of independent titles on iOS and Android platforms."The interesting part here is the games will be published under the Activision Mobile Publishing brand, but indie developers retain the rights to their intellectual property."Activision and Flurry are uniquely qualified to provide mobile developers with funding, resources and unmatched marketing expertise, while also allowing them to retain their intellectual property," said Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg. "We are confident this relationship and our new platform will yield significant results and are excited to launch it."It'll be interesting to see what type of indies this relationship nets. For anyone interested in hopping into this pool, we stress: have a good attorney.
Totem Talk: The confused state of level 90 enhancement shaman
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Once a lonely tauren shaman in a bad Scarlet Crusade-themed transmog set, Josh Myers is now a female dwarf shaman with pigtails who raids using all three specs on a regular basis. He kept the same transmog set, though. I'd like to preface this post with an apology. I'm sorry, shaman. I didn't mean to disappear for the past month, but I started a new job this month, and the ensuing chaos left me neglecting my monster-slaying duties. On the plus side, I didn't leave you guys for Diablo! Luckily, not much has changed for enhancement on beta since I slipped into solitude. And by "not much," I mean that there's been a single solitary patch note with class changes since I last posted. Flurry has been reduced to a 20% haste increase on crit, and you also gain a 50% additional benefit from haste on items. This change is obviously intended to address our incredibly lackluster scaling from haste. It's very reminiscent of the change in patch 3.1 that gave all melee classes an additional 30% haste from items. Prior to 3.1, haste was a lackluster stat for enhancement. By the end of Wrath of the Lich King, we were gemming straight haste rating. When Cataclysm hit, shaman were changed significantly to do less passive damage. The 30% haste rating benefit we enjoyed for over a year were reverted, and our benefit from haste rating plummeted.
Flurry's analytics: Apple's App Store revenue still leading, but Amazon Appstore close behind
Not like we haven't seen this dog-and-pony show before, but Flurry's latest round of analytics -- which measured revenue of 11 million daily active users from mid-January through the end of February 2012 -- shows Amazon's Appstore pulling in a shocking amount of revenue given the short life that it has lived. Apple's strength in sales has been well documented, but the latest report shows that for every $1 generated in the iTunes App Store, $0.89 is being spent in the Amazon Appstore. Looking more broadly, the numbers show that just $0.23 are generated in the Google Play halls for every $1 spent in the App Store, but that's hardly a new phenomenon; the ease of sideloading (amongst other factors) has raised complaints from Android developers for years now. Flurry's conclusion is that Google's core strength simply isn't in running a store -- something it's about to do once more with Android slates -- while both Apple and Amazon excel in doing just that. Curiously, Windows Phone and BlackBerry were left off of this report, but we're hoping to see those cats thrown in the next 'go round. After all, RIM sure seems certain that its developers are making out just fine.
Flurry: China's surpassed US in iOS and Android activations, but not smartphone install base (yet)
Color us unsurprised at the notion that the world's most populous country would one day be home to the greatest number of smartphones. That hasn't happened quite yet, but we're getting close per analytics firm, Flurry, who's measured China's surpassed the United States for the first time in combined iOS and Android activations in March. That's quite a difference from the beginning of 2011, when China held the 10th spot in the firm's rankings, before admittedly rising to an impressive second place by the end of that calendar year. And as you'd expect with growth trending in China's favor, it's now only a matter of when, not if, before it snatches the smartphone install-base crown from the current king, the US of A. But before jostling amongst yourselves on exactly when that'll happen, we'd recommend hitting that source link for a chart-filled run-down. Go on, it's fun for the whole family.
Study: free apps drain 75 percent more power, badly built advertising to blame
It's often said there's no such thing as a free lunch and that's doubly the case for free apps. A team from Purdue University found that nearly three quarters of the power used when you run an app like Angry Birds is actually used for adverts. It developed eprof, an app that investigates what processes are draining from your battery. Loading it onto the very old-school Android-powered myTouch 3G and Nexus One (not to mention a HTC TyTn II running Windows Mobile 6.5). Drilling down into those Angry Birds figures: the game itself only consumes 18 percent of the power, while advertising platform Flurry has 45 percent and GPS location tracking a further 15 percent. Project leader Abhinav Pathak lays the blame at the feet of poorly coded apps that need to be made significantly more efficient. He's now working with Microsoft to bring his software to Windows Phone and will present his findings at the EuroSys conference in Bern next month. If you don't think you'll be able to give up free apps, just remember to shut down GPS before you start smashing those pigs.
App usage doesn't drop during Super Bowl -- except during halftime
Mobile advertiser Flurry's latest report, on app usage during the Super Bowl, is fascinating for those of us who have been following the "second screen" phenomenon: The tendency of mobile device users to use their devices while also watching television or other media. Flurry notes that during last week's big game, not only was the app audience (according to the apps that the company is actually monitoring) almost as large as the Super Bowl audience as a whole, but as you can see above, app usage steadily grew throughout the game. With one interesting exception, that is: During the Madonna halftime show. During the show itself, viewers finally looked away from their smartphone devices and tuned into the television. Obviously not all of them did, but that is a big enough dip (along with the drop during the final minutes of the game) to say that yes, there's a big correlation here between what people are seeing on their televisions and how they're using their mobile devices. The opposite story is also true: Flurry was actually able to rank app usage versus the most and least popular commercials during the game. As you can see from the final charts in their report, on commercials that people generally liked and paid attention to, app usage dropped significantly. That's very intriguing: Most of the second screen work brands have done so far is designed to keep people using ads during commercials, but a study like this would suggest that customers would rather pay attention to good commercials. They postpone their interaction with those "marquee" ads until later on -- or during other ads, including possibly those of competitors. At any rate, this study definitely shines a new light on this second screen thinking, and we might see some new trends in apps trying to make use of this habit going forward.
App downloads top 1 billion during the holiday week
During the holiday week (by which we mean the seven days between the secularized celebration of a Christian holy day timed to replace a pagan winter festival and the beginning of a new year in the Gregorian calendar) the iTunes App Store and the Android Market combined to reach a record-breaking 1.2 billion downloads according to analytics firm Flurry. The sudden surge in downloads is no shock considering the impressive number of activations on Christmas day, but a 60 percent jump over the week of December 4th through December 17th is still quite a feat. Check out the source for a few more details.
Report: iOS and Android apps fighting for retention, not discovery
The latest Flurry report has an interesting insight for app developers. Over the last few years, as apps have gained more and more attention and users, discovery has been one of the biggest issues developers face: Most devs spend a lot of their time post-release just trying to tell as many people as possible about their app, so they can actually find it in the store and buy it. But Flurry now says that because of the growing amount of tools out there for app discovery, the biggest problem faced by apps isn't getting found anymore. It's trying to get customers to stick around. As you can see above, app user retention drops off sharply after the first month of usage, and only gets worse from there. Based on my own experience, I can agree with this assessment -- while I probably use more apps than the average consumer, even my favorite apps really only hold my attention for a few weeks at the most before I find something else I really like and move on. That's not a judgment on app quality -- there are just so many apps out there and apps always coming out and dropping in price and going free that there's always something shinier to move on to, no matter how great the app is. Especially with models like freemium, app retention becomes more and more important for developers. Presumably, then, the next tools developers need should not only work towards discovery (things like Game Center and OpenFeint have helped immensely with this kind of thing), but also should be aimed towards keeping users interested in the apps they have. The new Notification Center may help with something like that, or maybe a "Recently Used" folder on your iOS device, that pushes you back to apps you've used lately. It's fascinating to see that as the app ecosystem grows and ages, developers are facing new and different problems reaching users.
Younger audiences play more freemium games, but 25-34 year-olds pay for them
Flurry's latest post is yet another interesting read on freemium games on the App Store, specifically which age groups are playing them, and which age groups are paying for them. They've used consumer spending data across over 1.4 billion sessions, which means this information is as accurate as you're going to get outside of Apple's own databases. As you can see above, the patterns are interesting. Younger players are the primary users of freemium games, and that's not really surprising -- we've known for a while that the younger generation is downloading and playing more games than anyone else. But that third blue bar is the really interesting one: The people actually paying for freemium games are primarily in the 25-34 age group, right in the middle of the demographics. Sure, they're playing their share of the games, but freemium titles are almost completely funded by that stripe of the age demographic. And when you consider that the average freemium title only really pulls in-app purchases from a small percentage of its audience anyway, that age group becomes even more important. This seems logical, as most successful in-app purchase items are for convenience and time-saving. The 25-34 age group has more money but not as much free time as the younger audience, and thus are willing to shell out for items that help them in the game. But the big question is whether this will change as the years go by. As the younger audience gets older, will they become the main payers for these titles, or just stay the main players? We've only been playing with this model for a few years, and if the younger audience keeps playing without paying, freemium could be a short-lived trend.
Freemium items may make money for devs, but aren't kept by consumers
The developers behind the iOS game Hungry Shark recently released some statistics showing just how powerful the freemium model (in which customers download an app or game for free, and then support it with in-app purchases) can be. While the game floundered as a paid app, it's gotten much more popular after going free, and actually increased its revenue by five times over. Currently, says Future Games, the average in-app purchase is as high as $3.26, and that's in addition to having a daily active user base of 250,000 people. Clearly, the freemium model, when combined with the right game and the right audience, works very well. But what's the other side of the equation look like? Mobile advertising firm Flurry also released a report recently, and said that almost overwhelmingly, the main items sold in a freemium game are a "consumable" -- a boost or temporary ability that a customer can use up. That's opposed to a "durable" item, like a new weapon that stays around, or a "personalization" item, like a name change. Flurry says that since consumable items can often directly affect the game, consumers are much more interested in spending money on them, sometimes in surprising amounts. Now, I'd argue that beyond all of this data, it still depends on just what game and which items you're talking about. If a game is terrible, it's far from guaranteed to make any money no matter what model you're using. And I know for a fact that some consumers will backlash against a consumable item that affects gameplay too much, like a double-damage token in a multiplayer game, or anything else that could be seen as cheating. But for the right games, and for items used and sold in the right way, freemium can support an app and even a whole developer with significant amounts of revenue. Angry Birds has been cited before as a great example of how to implement freemium content, with its Mighty Eagle consumable item. And there are a number of other games out there that have figured all of this out, and have the monetary rewards to prove it.
