With the mobile app economy showing no signs of slowing down and consumers downloading most of their necessities, it's important to stay relevant by spotting emerging trends in the marketplace and reacting to any changes in user habits.

By identifying the ever-changing consumer wants and behavior, you can stay one-step-ahead, prepare your next development, or adjust your business strategies accordingly. Whether it’s finding out the latest arrivals to a vertical or examining year-over-year macro-level trends - our Games Breakdown and Store Summary modules provide a variety of insights into these evolving trends.

This guide focuses on exploring trends across the various verticals within the mobile app ecosystem using our Store Summary and Games Breakdown tools.

What is Store Summary?

Store Summary provides a high-level overview and store breakdown by Category, Country, and Device. Use this module for your market research needs to identify the latest trends in installs and revenue for each geo/store. 

Adjust the filters above each graph (date period, devices, categories, countries) for more refined download and revenue estimates. A Unified View is disabled for this module as we display non-aggregated data for each store of their unique categories. 

Compare by Category to identify the most popular and competitive verticals by downloads and revenue. Select All Categories to see which vertical dominates the market share in each store. Use this information to identify which verticals are achieving the highest monetization. How saturated is the current market?

In the above chart, we can see that for the year ending Feb 2020, Games, Photo & Video, and Entertainment were the most downloaded categories dominating around 47% of total iOS market share. Interestingly, when we adjusted the graph to display revenue, Games, Entertainment, and Social Networking apps generated the highest revenue (approx. 80%) across all categories. 

By adjusting the Date Granularity, we can identify seasonal macro-trends in each store and pinpoint when there are spikes for each category. For example, it’s safe to attribute huge spikes in downloads annually for Shopping to the holiday season (regional variances). 

Knowing when these spikes occur can help understand when to launch a new feature, promotion, or add a special event. Select multiple categories to examine trends side-by-side and predict future trends by examining year-over-year category growth.

Here we adjusted the Date Granularity to examine iOS Entertainment apps over a period of 30 days. Notice how download numbers increase towards the end of the week? Significant spikes seem to occur on the weekends indicating that users are downloading Entertainment apps less frequently on weekdays.

View Store Summary by Country, for a global overview on download and revenue trends. Which country’s users download Lifestyle apps the most, and when? Refine your results to identify which countries are growing strongest in each category. Examine category trends for each country and compare the differences, growth, and decline. Click on any country to check the Top Apps in any category and use App Analysis to examine these trends further.

Note: For a more generalized overview by continent, select ‘region’ from the Country/Region drop-down list to view the latest data estimates for 11 financial markets (98 countries).

Continuing with store trends, our Store Summary by Device view can illustrate which platforms hold the majority of market share per country and category. Which categories have a significant proportion of iPad downloads? Which countries generate the most revenue from iPhone devices?

Using Store Summary, we understand that the Gaming category has the highest penetration rate among worldwide users in both stores. Our Games Breakdown module helps dig deeper and view emerging consumer trends to spot the most competitive gaming categories.

 

What is Games Breakdown?

Games Breakdown is similar to our Store Summary module but here we are only looking at Games. There are a few differences in the game categories for each store so there’s no Unified view for this module. 

For the App Store, we display a primary category and an optional secondary category. Using this module, you can dissect data estimates for each category or sub-category. Spot gaming trends by refining your Date, Category, and Country filters in the Game Category module. Looking at both stores, you can see the genres achieving the highest monetization. Measure year-on-year growth to truly understand which subcategories are expanding, stagnating, or declining in market share.

In this chart, we can see Action, Casual, and Arcade games were the most downloaded Android games worldwide. You might think these are the best subcategories to launch a new game in, but when we flip the graph to view Revenue, we spot some major differences - The highest-grossing apps are actually Role Playing, Strategy, and Action Apps.

Again, this is a high-level store overview, and each sub-category probably performs differently for each country. Some sub-categories have a stronger presence in particular markets and may not be as successful in others. Using Games Breakdown by Country, you can compare these subcategories in over 90 countries to identify the differences and trends in consumer behavior.

By adjusting chart filters, we can visualize these differences and spot various patterns.

In this example, we see China and other SEA countries generate the most revenue and installs for iOS Strategy Games. In the same view, we can select a different sub-category to identify overlaps and recognize the most influential markets by Country or Region.

For extensive insights, use our Store Summary and Games Breakdown in parallel with Top Apps as part of wider market research to truly understand the impact the most successful verticals have on the other categories. Dig deeper into these trends with App Analysis and examine what is happening within any cohort. Export data with our Download CSV functionality to forecast and project future trends. Our Store Intelligence product focuses on those all-important and relevant market insights without additional noise!