Slowing growth rates and smaller Christmas Day app download spikes are a sign of maturity in the market, according to analytics firm Flurry, which noted that in Western Europe and English-speaking markets – where Christmas is a ‘big holiday’ – fewer customers are opening new devices for the first time.
“Consumers who are on second, third, or fourth devices have apps they like and trust, and while they still download new apps, there isn’t much more impetus to do so on Christmas than any other day when they have a little downtime,” the company said.
While new device activations do spike at Christmas, that spike is waning compared to previous years and, coming on top of a much larger installed base, means that the overall impact is not so big.
The biggest mobile growth now comes from countries where Christmas is either less significant or not celebrated at all, so new device activations and app downloads come at different times of the year.
And because these new high-growth markets are joining an already large global market, overall growth rates are “less striking” than when the mobile market was new.
According to the company, which bases its analysis on more than 400,000 apps tracked globally, Christmas downloads were up by 91 per cent compared to an average day in the first three weeks of December, although this spike is diminishing in size as the market matures and globalises.
For developers, this means that “the gold rush days of huge jumps in the overall size of the connected device installed base on Christmas, followed by a dizzying rush of app downloads, are fading”.
While there will “still be apps that tap into some vein of consumer interest or amusement and developers who strike it rich as a consequence”, generally success will come to “those who put in the hard work of identifying a target group of users, creating apps that work well for them, and continually refine and reinvent mobile experiences to profitably retain those users”, Flurry concluded.
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