Smartphones and tablets have become a yearly-release for many of the biggest consumer electronics firms around the world, but there’s one constant that keeps these devices in use by so many people all over the world; apps and games. We spend more money on apps and games than many of us ever thought we would, and the app economy has become an absolute goldmine for those lucky enough to make it big. App Annie, the firm responsible for much of the research that keeps the industry updated has launched new figures today, casting an eye over a crystal ball of apps.
According to today’s new report, the App Economy throughout 2016 is said to grow by 24% reaching $51 Billion, and will apparently exceed $100 Billion by 2020. It’s important to note that App Annie uses data from not just the Play Store and the iOS App Store, but also 3rd Party App Stores and other platforms, too. This is perhaps why App Annie predicts the Chinese app market to surpass that of the U.S. by the first-half of 2016. This leads on from the Chinese market having surpassed the U.S. in terms of downloads during the same period last year. In China, the app stores are sort of like a wild west compared to how we do things. Xiaomi runs their own app store for instance and there’s a myriad of different app stores, rather than the majority of uses choosing Google’s Play Store or Amazon’s App Store here in the US. Emerging markets appear to be doing well all around, with App Annie reporting a strong 2015 for both Argentina and Brazil to name but a few.
App Annie uses data from as many 10,000 different sources, and across its six-year history they’ve offered all sorts of insights. This is their first yearly report that details the future of the economy and while growth in the mobile apps market seems inevitable it is interesting to see China overtaking the U.S. Of course, the Far East nation clearly has more users, but the market just five years ago was very, very different to how it is now and it just goes to show firms like Google that China is the next big source of growth where app revenue is concerned.