Social apps dominate time spent on mobile with 394pc growth

Making the digital platform a virtual war field, a new app is reaching the play store almost every day. With the growing social media adoption, mobile app usage is also growing swiftly. However, according to a new report, this growth seems to have reached its maturity level.

The report - State of Mobile report for 2016 - posted by Flurry Analytics, a part of the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite, claims that in the next couple of years these growing apps will attack one another.

Simon Khalaf, Senior Vice President, Yahoo explained, “Compared to the year prior, overall app usage grew by 11 percent and time spent in apps grew by 69 percent. In previous years, we saw all app categories growing in tandem; however, this year the story is different. After shifting the web and television to the rear view mirror, mobile apps started eating their own, with session and time spent growth in some app categories occurring at the expense of others.”

“While Messaging and Social applications drove year-over-year session - every time a user opens a particular application - growth at 44 percent, the Personalization category gave up a staggering 46 percent in session usage. This steep decline in usage can be attributed to diminishing value for users of these products,” he further added.

Interestingly, while some of the previous years saw growth across all app categories, 2016 witnessed a more focused rate of increase.

Social Media & messaging apps:

Based on the data tracked from more than 940,000 applications, across 2.1 billion devices, in 3.2 trillion sessions, Flurry claims that "time spent in social media and messaging apps grew by an astounding 394 percent over the last year, proving to be the driver that helped mobile achieve its year-over-year time-spent growth of 69 percent."

The report also said that social media apps are majorly absorbing the media industry. "This is a result of consumers using their social and messaging apps as their voice and video calling utilities, as well as the phenomenon we call Communitainment. With news and magazines sessions down 5 percent and Music, Media and users continue Entertainment up only 1 percent; it’s safe to say that Social has absorbed the media industry."

Apps Tied to Daily Habits:

Business and Finance (up 43% in time-spent) and Sports (up 25% in time-spent) categories were immune to growth decay because they are intrinsically centered around mobile activities and rely on real time data. We anticipate further growth in these categories as users continue to shift daily habits away from traditional media channels, i.e., watching live sports, market reports and the morning news on their TVs, to the apps on their phones.

Gaming apps:

Though messaging and social applications registered a huge boom, the gaming segment, on the other hand, registered a negative growth.

Gaming category saw 4 percent year-over-year decline. The report said, "Users are increasingly comfortable paying their way through games, with the mobile gaming industry seeing a strong increase in revenues according to Apple’s latest App Store report." Meanwhile, Pokemon Go and Super Mario, both failed to leave any lasting impacts despite being instant hits at the time of their launch.

Shopping apps:

Though messaging and social media apps took a large piece of the cake, shopping apps also managed to make most in the year. "Shopping apps grew 31 percent in time spent. A report by Adobe shows a very healthy growth in online sales, with Amazon grabbing 38 percent of holiday sales transactions from November 1 through December 29, 2016," the study said.