App sessions growth in Europe is 12 percent higher than those in the U.S. based on data tracked over the past year by Flurry. The Yahoo-owned service recently published it's first "deep dive" based on 725,000 apps across 564 million devices in Europe.
- The global average growth in sessions from October 2014 to October 2015 was 64 percent. The U.S., for comparison, posted 52 percent.
- Emerging economies like Brazil and India posted gains of 189 percent and 107 percent, respectively.
- In Europe, the growth of France and Spain is on par with global average at 63 percent and 61 percent, respectively.
- The British and French spend almost twice as much of their time in messaging and social apps, versus in games, at approximately 40 percent of total app time.
- Italy, on the other hand, spends the lowest percentage of their time in Messaging and Social, perhaps because only 66 percent of the population can be messaged via smartphone.
- Music, Media and Entertainment apps seem to hold the same interest in users irrespective of the borders, around 10 percent of their app time.
"As we reported previously, there has been a global revolution in phablet adoption and we see that Europe is not far behind the global trend," the report said. "Consistent with the global trend, small phones have been nearly wiped off the map in Europe. Small tablets, like the iPad Mini, haven't really caught on anywhere but the UK. It's clear that like in the rest of the world, European consumers are becoming increasingly smitten with larger screen sizes.
The Flurry data is a good reminder for devs to think global when they're creating apps and mobile games. While sometimes app makers consider localization for far-flung international markets, the demand may be growing at a pace where, particularly on devices with larger screens, usage trends overseas may eventually dwarf what we see in North America. This could offer some hope for those not entirely sure about the prospects of the iPad Pro, or similar devices from Samsung and even Microsoft. If nothing else this proves there's a wide world of opportunity for indies left to conquer.
For more:
- see the full report here
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