2017 belonged to mobile app innovation, says report

A part of the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite, Flurry Analytics, on Thursday announced its annual global mobile and application usage study.

For an industry that's seen staggering growth and disruption since the launch of the first smartphone, believes that 2017 was the year that mobile app innovation and growth was disrupted.

Stalwart industry players held and gained market position, while years-old disruptors struggled to find their footing.

Compared to 2016, Flurry measured overall session app activity growth of just six percent. While growth may have stagnated, users continue to diversify their behaviour while using mobile applications.

Over the last year, Flurry's app footprint grew to track more than one million applications, across 2.6 billion devices globally. In this context, the company defines app usage as a user opening an app and recording what we call a session.

According to the report, this past year's six percent growth is down from 11 percent in 2016.

Users now spend more than five hours a day on their smartphones, and shift their daily time spent between new and old app experiences, versus giving more of their overall daily time.

Moreover, according to the report, users are increasingly comfortable making physical purchases on their phones with now ingrained in-app digital purchase habits.

Additionally, digital wallet services such as Apple Pay and Samsung Pay allow seamless access to stored payment information for mobile purchases.

Lifestyle saw the steepest decline in growth with -40 percent in 2017.

The decline in Lifestyle, a catchall category for both the Google Play and Apple App stores, highlights an app's need to build daily usage habits in order to retain or increase year-over-year growth.

While Gaming saw another year of decline in sessions with -15 percent in 2017, Flurry has previously reported that gamers are spending more time and money in mobile games than ever before.