Mobile app usage reportedly increased dramatically at the peak of the COVID-19 lockdown worldwide. With people largely staying indoors because of the pandemic, time spent on mobile apps grew 40% year-over-year in Q2, 2020. According to new data from App Annie, people the world over spent an all-time monthly high of over 200 billion hours during April 2020.
India saw the biggest hike, with people spending 35% more time on mobile apps in Q2, 2020 over Q4, 2019. Meanwhile, Italy, Indonesia and the US showed 30%, 25% and 15% growth, respectively. “This significant increase in usage was fueled by social distancing and lockdown measures undertaken throughout the world to combat the spread of the coronavirus pandemic”, said the report.
Q2 2020 was also the largest quarter in history for consumer spending on the mobile app eco-system. As per the report, consumer spend on iOS grew 15% year-over-year to $17 billion in Q2 2020, and 25% on Google Play to $10 billion. Non-gaming apps accounted for 35% of consumer spend on iOS and 15% on Google Play, largely due to in-app subscriptions. The US and China were the largest contributors to consumer spend on iOS during the period.
TikTok was the number one app during this period both in terms of downloads and consumer spend. Overall, Google Play downloads during the quarter grew 10% year-over-year to 25 billion. App Store downloads, meanwhile, grew 20% year-over-year to nearly 10 billion. Non-gaming apps accounted for 55% of all downloads on Google Play. On iOS, the figure was slightly higher at 70%.
On Google Play, the most number of downloads came from India and Brazil. India was also one of the major growth drivers for the platform during the quarter, alongside Brazil and Indonesia. Meanwhile, on iOS, the US and China were the two largest markets by downloads, while the US and Saudi Arabia were the main drivers of growth quarter-over-quarter.
