App Annie: Consumers Spending In App Stores Up 25 Pct To $112 Billion

Spending in app stores soared this year, according to a report from App Annie, with the global spend total hitting $112 billion and growing 25 percent since last year.

Spending in Apple‘s App Store and Google‘s Google Play set a new record, App Annie said in the report, and despite 65 cents of every dollar going to iOS, Google Play spending is set to grow nearly 30 percent.

The top markets spurring growth for iOS are the U.S., Japan and the U.K., a shift from 2018 and 2019 when China was among the top markets for growth, the report stated. For Google Play, the top markets include the U.S., South Korea and Germany, a change from the past few years when the U.K. and Japan were among them.

Evaluating various categories of spending, 71 cents of every dollar went to games, with the pandemic spurring people stuck inside during quarantine to play more games on their phones. Photo and video as well as social networking were also among the top-earning categories, the report stated.

The lockdown was a major source of the increase, with a 40 percent jump in how much time people were spending on apps, coming out to over 200 billion hours cumulatively spent on the apps in April alone. The trend was present in numerous countries hit particularly hard by the pandemic, including India with 35 percent growth and Italy with 30 percent.

“…we have all leaned on mobile to connect, work, learn, play and escape,” App Annie said in the report. “At the height of the pandemic our mobile usage has sky-rocketed — accelerating our mobile adoption by 2 to 3 years.”

App spending wasn’t slouching prior to the pandemic, though. In 2019, spending on apps saw a marked increase in mobile credit card apps and other payments-related services. The apps often let users check credit card balances, redeem rewards and receive alerts for real-time transactions, among other features, and over 40 percent of U.S. consumers had downloaded them at the end of last year.