Growing messaging applications

The increasingly competitive nature of the App Store and the large number of applications emerging suggest that a tiny number of apps will manage to become major financial successes. These forecasts indicate that only 0.01% of new apps will report large economic profits in 2018. Leaving these forecasts aside, what is clear is that neither the number of applications launched on the market nor our use of them has slowed down. Flurry Analytics has released the latest data from its study related to application usage and revealed a very important fact: messaging applications show the most spectacular growth achieved last year: an increase of 203%. The rise of this type of application was one of the most important events of 2013, indicating a slight shift away by users from other social media platforms such as Facebook in favor of these instant messaging apps. According to the report (analyzes 400,000 applications) from which these data are derived, messaging applications could have enough potential to become platforms in their own right. The report cites LINE as an example, which launched in Japan last year and accumulated more than 100 million downloads in less than three months since its launch. WeChat partnered with device manufacturer Xiaomi, which has launched a new smartphone aimed at WeChat users. A total of 150,000 devices were sold in less than ten minutes through a messaging application that alludes to the capabilities of this type of application to sell physical products as well. However, although messaging applications were the ones that experienced the highest growth in 2013, there were others that also posted good figures. For example, the use of utility and productivity apps increased by 149%, indicating that smartphones and tablets are becoming users' personal computers. This report indicates that instead of using phones and tablets for basic tasks such as web searches, checking email, or playing, they are beginning to be used with increasingly complex applications as personal computer use declines. Games were another of the categories that also increased in 2013 (66%) despite fears that the sector was reaching saturation levels. Overall, it has been recorded that the application download growth rate may be slowing down.