Social apps dominate mobile activity
Yahoo's mobile analytics arm Flurry has released its State of Mobile report for 2016, looking at mobile app activity and trends from the last year.
Over the last year, Flurry tracked more than 940,000 applications, across 2.1 billion devices, in 3.2 trillion sessions. Compared to 2015 overall app usage grew by 11 percent and time-spent in apps grew by 69 percent.
Growth in some app categories, however, has been at the expense of other apps rather than traditional media. Messaging and social applications for example saw year-on-year growth at 44 percent, while the personalization category lost 46 percent in session usage.
"Time spent in social 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," says Simon Khalaf, SVP at Yahoo. "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 five percent and music, media and entertainment up only one percent, it’s safe to say that social has absorbed the media industry".
Other winners are business and finance (up 43 percent in time-spent) and Sports (up 25 percent in time-spent) these categories have proved immune to growth decay because they are intrinsically centered around mobile activities and rely on real time data. Yahoo anticipates further growth in these categories as users continue to shift daily habits away from traditional media channels like TV.
Gaming meanwhile saw a small decline of four percent, while mobile shopping apps have seen a growth of 31 percent in time spent on them. The report also notes that phablets are becoming the device of choice around the world, capturing 41 percent of market share as users continue to find value in the larger screen size.
You can read more about the findings on the Flurry Tumblr.
Photo credit: tulpahn / Shutterstock