Future of Mobile Phones

The Usage of Mobile Apps

Virtually every day, new evidence emerges of the consumer shift to mobile. According to new data from Gartner, by 2017, mobile apps will be downloaded more than 268 billion times, generating revenue of more than $77 billion and making apps one of the most popular computing tools for users across the globe. To put these huge numbers in context by comparing them to the current world population of approximately 7.1 billion and counting, by 2017, every man, woman and child on the planet will have downloaded 37 mobile apps. (Horton, 2014)

Here is a recent visual comparison of the usage of mobile apps vs. the usage of mobile web.

This comparison correlates with Gartner’s research. Not only do we download a massive amount of apps, we also spend much of our time using them. At this rate, mobile apps may well overtake the usage of mobile web.

For a further breakdown of mobile app usage, Flurry has conducted an analysis on the overall usage of different mobile app categories for 2013. Utilities and productivity apps rose by 149 percent, music and entertainment apps by 78 percent, and games by 66 percent. But the biggest leap was achieved by messaging and social apps, which climbed by 203 percent. (Whitney, 2014)