Maybe it’s Covid-19 or maybe that’s just how the world is now but many of us are spending more time on our phones.
App Annie has released its State of Mobile 2022 report, which looked at mobile habits for 2021, and estimated that across its top 10 markets (including Indonesia, Japan and Singapore), we spend about ⅓ of our waking hours – an average of 4 hours and 48 minutes – on our phones.
That’s a 30% jump from 2019.
And it’s not hard to see why.
Two million new apps and games were released last year, bringing the total number of apps and games ever released on iOS and Google Play to over 21 million.
Games themselves represented 15% of all new releases in 2021.
233 apps and games also generated over US$100 million dollars last year, with 13 (!) of them surpassing US$1 billion.
The majority of them belong to mobile games – including PUBG Mobile (the mobile adaption of PUBG Battlegrounds, which is now F2P!) and Genshin Impact.
And speaking of Genshin Impact, it was among the top five games that gamers spent their money on in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.
Worldwide, the mobile Battle Royale game Free Fire topped the download charts – holding onto its crown of the most downloaded mobile game for a second year in a row.
The report also noted consumers spent US$170 billion on apps last year, an increase of almost 20% from 2020.
Downloads are also continuing to grow – with 230 billion downloaded apps in 2021 – thanks to growing mobile adoption worldwide.
*Featured image from Unsplash/@Screenpost
By Samantha Chan \ 10:00am, 31 January 2022