All the numbers were green for apps in the first half of 2023 according to a new study just released by Data.ai.
The year 2022 was the first in a long time to see a drop in the level of expenditure made across the planet for mobile applications, the fault of inflation felt in the four corners of the world. But the situation, it seems, quickly recovered.
A new spending record
It looks like 2022 was only ever a departure from the upward trend in spending on smartphone apps. Indeed, according to figures reported by data.ai, the first half of 2023 was very successful at this level, with 67.5 billion dollars paid by users to obtain the services of their favorite apps.
It is thus a growth of 5.3% over one year which is recorded, after the trough of the first quarter of 2022 (64.1 billion dollars). Better still, it is a spending record for the first half of a year, the previous one dating from 2021, with 65.9 billion dollars paid by smartphone owners.
More applications downloaded
And one record can hide another. While spending on apps saw a trough last year, app downloads are entitled to a linear increase, with each year looking better than the last. The first half of 2023 was no exception to the rule, with 76.8 billion application downloads recorded then.
The figure, the highest ever recorded during a semester, follows the trend already observed in the second half of 2022, and represents an increase of 3.2% over one year (74.4 billion downloads had been recorded in the first half of 2022 ).
Although Android has a much larger market than iOS, iPhone downloads have grown the most this semester. They were thus 58.7 billion on Android (+1.4% over the year) while with more than 18 billion downloads at the same time, iOS can show an increase of 10%.
iOS still above Android
This is not the only area where the Cupertino company does better than the operating system of its rivals in the smartphone sector. Because iPhone owners not only download more apps, they also spend more money on them. Indeed, as the report notes, “ iOS accounts for nearly 65% of total app store spend combined, and the figure is even higher in purely non-gaming apps, where iOS accounts for 71% of all spend. »
In detail, we can see that iOS represents a volume of expenditure of 43.5 billion dollars for the first six months of the year 2023, which corresponds to an increase of +5.8% year-on-year. Android for its part, even if it shows a growth slightly below, benefits from the current upturn, and with 24 billion dollars in sales over this period can post an increase in Google Play revenues of +4%.
The top 10 does not move (almost)
While we can see a general growth in results, the applications that benefit the most from the good performance of business hardly change at the top of the poster. Thus, the top 10 of the most downloaded applications has hardly changed, except that TikTok has stolen the world number 1 spot from Instagram, while Snapchat has fallen one place compared to CapCut.
In terms of the ranking of the biggest expenses, stability is even more appropriate, apart from the arrival of LinkedIn at 10e place. TikTok, again, set two new records by becoming the first application to exceed $1 billion in consumer spending in one quarter (during the 1st quarter of 2023). It is also the first to this time exceed the threshold of 2 billion dollars over one semester (the 1st semester of 2023).
Finally, in the section of the most used applications, absolutely nothing changes in the top 10, the 4 Meta applications (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger) still occupying the first four places in the ranking. And if we imagine a credible competitor in the near future capable of shaking up this hierarchy a little, it could once again be a creation of Meta, with the new trendy social network Threads.
Source: Report from data.ai
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