History and Statistics of Mobile Apps
History and Statistics of Mobile Apps
By: Evan Frizzell
History
According to Captechu, mobile apps were first introduced to the world in the 1980s with the release of the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). The PDA came with apps that could be used day to day such as a calculator and clock. These were two of the first “apps” introduced in a mobile device. Within 10 years of the PDA the first smartphone was released by IBM which had very similar apps to the PDA. After that came the BlackBerry Smartphone which was the first to bring email into the mobile world. These advancements in technology were huge steps to where we are today but there was one jump that is beyond the PDA and BlackBarry. This being Apple’s app store which was released in 2010 and had a large focus on creating so many apps including some that were not necessarily practical. The app store introduced people to so much more than a calculator, clock or email. The app store brough games, news, tv, streaming ect. This was huge for Apple and in the first ten years of the app store being out it surpassed all of Apple’s expectations. Apple reported that in quarter 3 alone of 2021 they had over 30 billion apps downloaded through their app store. Apple truly recognized the potential that apps held for technology and brought that potential to light.
Mobile Statistics
As of 2022 there are over 4 million apps available for download between the App Store and Google play giving the 6 billion smartphone users and the 1 billion tablet users a large variety of apps to explore. The US consumer spends 70% of their digital media time on roughly 10 different apps a day and 30 apps in a month.
Since 2016 app downloads worldwide have gone up from 140 billion to almost 220 billion representing a 55% growth in downloads. These downloads are from both free and paid downloads. The difference in these cases is that a free app does not require any kind of money transfer to the developer or developers whereas a paid download app does include a money transfer. With free apps there are often times in app advertisements where other companies and other games will pay to have their products advertised in the app. This gives the developer of the app the opportunity to make money off their creation. This kind of advertising also pushes people to pay to remove the ads in the app so that they do not have to see them anymore. This is common among free games because they can pull you in with the fact that it is free then basically annoy you with ads till you pay to remove them. Paid apps will come with whatever you pay for and without ads allowing you to enjoy the app and not be frustrated with ads.
Google Play v. Apple App Store
In quarter 3 of 2020 Google reported that their app store had 28.3 billion global downloads which was up 31% from the previous year at 21.6 billion downloads. Apple does not come close to the downloads that Google reported. Apple had 8.2 billion in 2020 which was only up 2.5% from the previous year which was 8 billion global downloads. The Google Play Store represents way more global downloads than that of Apple and this may be attributed to the fact that androids are the majority mobile device used around the world.
Most Popular App Types
In 2022 BuildFire conducted a study to find what the most popular kind of app was in the previous year, 2021. The results they found are that the top three categories were Games (21.5%), Business (10.1%), and Education (8.7%). These three categories make up 40 percent of all 16 categories for downloadable apps.
Sources:
https://www.captechu.edu/blog/brief-history-of-mobile-apps