How many hours do you spend per day on your smartphone? And on which applications? Like every year, data.ai, a mobile data analysis platform, publishes its report on mobile usage around the world. Good news, the French are not the most addicted to their phones. Over the year 2023, we devoted a little more than 3.6 hours per day to it. That is approximately the same duration as the previous three years.
France is within the European average, close to the mobile exposure times of Spain (3.6 hours), Germany (3.4 hours) and Italy (3.8 hours). Very far from the champions in all categories found in South East Asia. The Indonesians and Thais double down by spending more than 6 hours and 5.6 hours respectively tapping. South America is in ambush with Argentina (5.3 hours) and Brazil (5 hours) in the wake of Saudi Arabia (5.3), India (4.7) and Mexico (4.7).
Across all the geographies studied by data.ai, users spend on average more than 5 hours every day with their eyes glued to their smartphone. An increase of 6% compared to 2022. Australia, Japan, and Canada have shown the strongest progress since 2020 with double-digit growth rates.
The mobile economy generates nearly $1.5 billion per day
This intensive use is also verified in terms of downloads. The report reveals that 257 billion applications were downloaded in 2023 on iOS, Google Play or other marketplaces, particularly Chinese ones, or 489,000 downloads per minute. If this volume remains stable (1%), it will delight publishers. The mobile application industry has a turnover of $171 billion, growing by 3%. That’s $325,000 spent per minute
If we add up the mobile advertising market – $362 billion (+ 8%) – we arrive at a global market of $533 billion in 2023. That is nearly $1.5 billion in spending every day in 2023 between earnings recorded by application stores and advertising revenue. Almost twice the GDP of Finland, the country where mobile was born. In value terms, France ranks 10th in the top 20 mobile markets with a consumption of 2.4 billion euros, far from China, the United States or Japan.
If we zoom in this time on the type of services, the mobile games market continued to decline by 2% after the drop of 4% recorded in 2022. A misleading result because it is the fall of nearly of 11% of spending on mobile games in China which weighs down the global result. Excluding China, the mobile gaming market continues to grow by 4%. As for other applications, those related to travel are breaking records with more than 3 billion downloads in 2023, an increase of 13%.
TikTok, the most profitable application in history
China is doing well. The applications of e-retailers Temu and Shein are making a breakthrough in the Western world, with growth of 140%, Temu is even leading downloads in 125 countries. On the social media side, TikTok is the first mobile application not linked to the world of gaming to generate $10 billion in revenue thanks to its concept of paying video creators by “tipping”.
According to data.ia, TikTok is ready to overtake the gaming giants in 2024 and consolidate its position as the most profitable application in history. In France, it is already the third most viewed application, behind YouTube and Chrome, with growth of 8%.
Finally, unsurprisingly, generative AI experienced a strong breakthrough in 2023, multiplying its audience sevenfold. OpenAI’s ChatGPT saw immediate success after launching on iOS in March 2023 and then on Google Play in July. Generative AI applications – ChatGPT but also Ask AI or Character AI – have exceeded $10 million in monthly spending by the end of 2023.