Competition and Disparity Between Mobile Apps Continue to Grow

The Apple and Google app stores now have more than 4 million apps for download.  The app market is maturing and we are using apps beyond messaging, social media and entertainment. We use apps to order a ride, turn on the house alarm, order lunch for the team, and stay connected over slack.

Comparing Mary Meeker’s 2016 numbers to previous year’s data from Statistica, we know people are

• installing more apps (37 vs. 27 apps),
• are spending more time in apps (4-5 vs. 2.8 hours) and
• using more apps on a daily basis (12 vs. 4-6 apps) this year versus last year.

Advances in deep learning, artificial intelligence and conversational user interfaces will continue to making our mobile devices much more accessible and usable than ever before.

The App Competition Is Growing

The second calendar quarter (April-June 2016) was a record quarter with 237,376 app submissions on the Apple app store which continued with almost 2500 app submissions per day in July 2016 and later confirmed by Tim Cook in his tweet:

App submissions have grown from 3,280 in 2008 Q3 to 237,376 in the most recent quarter (2016 Q2).  The slowdown in app submission rate in early 2015 has been wiped by the significant growth in late 2015 and 2016.

The Disparity Between Apps Is Growing

On August 3, 2016, Tim Cook tweeted App publishers have earned over $50 billion on the Apple store.

On August 16, Pokémon Go made $1.9 million and Game of War made $1.5 million.  However, over half of the app publishers made less than $16 that day.

Top 20 game earnings, per Think Gaming, for August 16:

Per the Developer Economics Q3 2015, 51% of mobile developers are below the app poverty line and earn less than $500 per month

Here is a detailed graphical representation of the findings.

• The 51% app publishers that make less than $500 a month, includes 19% who have zero monetization.
• 72% of app publishers make less than $5000 a month.
• 13% of app publishers make over $50,000 per month, which includes 4% app developers that make over $500,000 per month.

The explosive growth, fierce competition and the huge disparity continue and are expected to continue.  Apps with data and intelligence will continue winning while the majority struggles.