How long are you on your phone every day? Well if you are an average Indian — 4.7 hours a day. And that's an hour more than what we were spending on our phones pre-pandemic in 2019, found App Annie, a mobile data and analytics company. So are we gaming more? Nope, gaming time has actually decreased over 2021 and people are more into apps like TikTok (or Taka Tak and others for India) and YouTube. “Mobile is the Greatest of All Time and the go-to device of the future,” said Theodore Krantz, App Annie's Chief Executive Officer. “The big screen is slowly dying as mobile continues to break records in virtually every category - time spent, downloads and revenue.”
The report found that seven of every 10 minutes on mobile was spent on social and photo and video apps in 2021. "As time increases on mobile in emerging categories, consumers are also engaging deeper in early-mover categories like social, communication and photo and video apps," read the global report. "While photo and video apps have seen an increase in market share of time spent, this has largely not been at the expense of current habits. Rather, consumers have turned historically 'non-mobile' time into time spent in apps and games," it added.
Do you think Netflix and chill is the shizz? Well, India does not agree wth you. Indians have streamed 8 per cent video content in 2021 as compared to 2019. But this stat is just for phones, with android TVs becoming a regular thing, the watch hours has definitely not gone down. "Netflix has the largest global footprint among video streaming platforms and a robust audience in each — with over 1 million local downloads in 60+ countries," said the report.
The report said that the younger generations are still not that much into finance as much as they are into photo and video apps — no matter how many cool crypto awareness ads are aired. "Finance and shopping apps haven’t managed to reach a broad Gen Z audience, but these categories have experienced strong growth YoY and represent a promising area for investment. These categories tend to skew more towards millennials at this stage," said the report.
There's a gender skew as well. The report found that sports apps overindex heavily with males in each market analysed, whereas food and drink apps tend to skew more female. "However, the difference can be subtle in the case of the US for food and drink and more dramatic in other markets like Japan. We also see that the most used apps in each country tend to buck category. For instance, Shopping apps on the whole tend to skew more female overall, yet Amazon skews more male in Japan, the UK, Germany, France and Canada. Only in the US does Amazon skew more female," said the study.
