The latest app trends report from analytics provider App Annie has revealed good news for the UK industry; Candy Crush Saga was the most popular app by number of downloads in 2013.
The app, from developer house King, beat off competition from other perennial gaming app powerhouses, including Subway Surfers (2nd), Temple Run 2 (3rd), and Angry Birds (6th).
Yet when it came to revenue, Candy Crush Saga finished second behind GungHo Online’s Puzzle & Dragons. The best money-making app outside of gaming in 2013 was chat app LINE, followed by Pandora Radio and Zoosk.
LINE came sixth in the most downloaded apps worldwide outside of games – an impressive figure on the face of it, but behind other messaging apps Facebook Messenger (4th), Skype (3rd) and WhatsApp Messenger (2nd). Facebook came top.
The report from App Annie, which independently tracks 350,000 apps and has tracked over 33 billion downloads to date, found some potentially game changing trends in the mobile app space.
According to the research, app spending has surpassed game-optimised handhelds for the first time. The App Store numbers surged ahead of handhelds in Q1 2013, with Google Play moving ahead in Q2 after a severe decline in handheld numbers.
One of the more interesting facets of the report compares the App Store with Google Play. Unsurprisingly the App Store continues to go up in monetisation, but Google Play went ahead of iOS in overall downloads, nudging towards 150m.
Another traditional pillar has fallen this year. The US is no longer the leader in app downloads, with Japan moving ahead in indexed revenue for the first time as of October 2013. The UK was fourth in the global spend list for iOS and Android apps.
Yet some figures released from the study won’t come as a surprise; the amount of apps which used a freemium model in 2013 grew from 86% to 93%.
But it’s the shift to Google Play from iOS in downloads, and the move to apps from handheld gaming which really stand out. You can find the report here. What do you make of the results?
