App Category Insights

Are App Developers Shifting Revenue Models as Advertising Gets Challenged?

Since the App Store and Google Play launched over a decade ago, advertising has enabled app publishers to offer free, high quality applications. Even when users fail to explicitly pay an app publisher for the use of an app, the publisher can still earn revenue. With 76% of all apps generating revenue from advertising, according to a recent Ad Colony survey, the ad revenue model has been a cornerstone of app monetization—at least until this year.

America Learns to Bake During U.S. Coronavirus Lockdown

With many restaurants and bars closed during COVID-19, sessions in the Food and Drink app category declined by an average of 18% during the lockdown. While aggregate mobile app usage in the category has declined, we suspect that within Recipe, Takeout and Restaurant sub-categories, the story is different. In this report, to gain insights in cooking and eating habits during the pandemic, we look at the change in usage per Food & Drink sub-categories for the first 6 months of 2020.

Mobile Investment Apps Soar Amid Turbulent U.S. Stock Market

From February 19 to March 23, driven by a combination of economic impact due to COVID-19 and an oil price war between Russia and OPEC, the U.S. stock market plummeted by more than 30%. Since then, the market has been wildly volatile. Flurry has been studying app behavior extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic and recently released a report about the top U.S. app category winners and losers. Investment-related finance apps topped the charts by a wide margin. This got us thinking about the relationship between market volatility and the use of mobile investment apps —and that’s the topic of this report.

Top U.S. Mobile App Category Winners and Losers During Coronavirus

Since March, Flurry estimates that U.S. app usage has risen by approximately 10%. Considering how saturated the U.S. market is with smartphones, and already using apps at record levels, this additional and sudden lift is noteworthy. At the same time, while aggregate usage is up, usage across individual app categories varies wildly. At the extremes there are big winners and losers. In this report, Flurry reveals how usage has changed across the top app categories in the U.S. during the first 6 months of 2020.

Gen Z Mobile Game App Usage Surges Amid Coronavirus

In this report, we evaluate how COVID-19 and social distancing have impacted the game app category. Why games? Games is among the most universally used app categories by all age groups, and serves as a bellwether to start understanding shifts in mobile usage behavior. We’ll walk through analyses that show there is a marked step-up in the number of people using gaming apps, usage has grown by an even larger factor, and that the largest growth is concentrated among Gen Z.

Mobile News App Consumption Surges in 2020

2020 has featured an unusually high concentration of major events that have dominated the news. The first quarter included mounting tensions with Iran, President Trump’s impeachment trial, and the untimely death of Kobe Bryant. The second quarter focused on the rise of Coronavirus, economic uncertainty and national protests about racial injustice. The result has been a significant, sustained increase in the consumption of news, including in mobile apps. In this report, Flurry takes a look at news consumption patterns in mobile news applications across the first six months of 2020.

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