The State of Apps: Fresh Insights from Nielsen’s Mobile Apps Playbook
Notes from “The State of Apps: Fresh Insights from Nielsen’s Mobile Apps Playbook”, a session at the AppNation Conference in September 2010
Session given by Jonathan Carson, CEO, Telecom Practice, the Nielsen Company
Some stats from a recent Nielsen report:
- 25% of Americans now have smartphones, up from 16% in 2009, and projected to exceed 50% by the end of 2011
- 59% of smartphone users use apps
- Android’s share of downloads exceeds its market share: it currently has 14% of the smartphone market, but 20% of app downloads—this means Android users are more frequent app downloaders than other platforms
- “Category champions”, or the biggest names in a particular category, dominate the most popular app categories like social networking (ie Facebook), maps (Google), music
- People’s willingness to pay for apps changes across app categories; it’s as high as 91% in games, dropping down to 76% in news
- Just 10% of users say that ads on their mobile are acceptable, yet 33% say they’re open to them if it lowers their bill
- Younger users are far more active with mobile ads than other age groups, which is very different from other platforms like the web, and somewhat counterintuitive
- Ad clickthroughs vary across platforms as well; from highest to lowest: Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Palm, RIM
- 50% of the total mobile data in the US is consumed by the top 10% of users; the top 1% of users consume almost 15% of the total
- The total quantity of data consumed has nearly tripled in the past year.
Key takeaways:
- Pay attention to this type of data when you are planning your app, so it can inform your development, monetization and marketing strategy.
- Don’t assume that’s what true for users on one platform is the same for users on another platform. Different platforms see different user behaviors, both because of their differing features and UIs, but also because of the differing demographics of their underlying user groups.