By A Correspondent

Flurry Analytics, part of the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite announced its annual global mobile and application usage study. In its eighth year, the study offers interesting insights on global mobile app usage and trends from the last year on over 2.1 billion smart devices and 3.2 trillion sessions.

Throughout 2016, which was also the last year of the first decade for mobile apps, the industry managed to squeak-out another 365 days of growth.

Mobile Growth Hits Critical Mass: Usage Up 11 per cent

“Over the last year, the Flurry footprint grew to track more than 940,000 applications, across 2.1 billion devices, in 3.2 trillion sessions. In this context, we define app usage as a user opening an app and recording what we call a “session,” as well as the amount of time spent in the application,” said Simon Khalaf, SVP, Yahoo. He added, “Compared to the year prior, overall app usage grew by 11% and time-spent in apps grew by 69%. In previous years, we saw all app categories growing in tandem; however, this year the story is different. After shifting thewebandtelevision to the rearview mirror, mobile apps started eating their own, with session and time-spent growth in some app categories occurring at the expense of others. While Messaging and Social applications drove year-over-year session growth at 44%, the Personalization category gave up a staggering 46% in session usage. This steep decline in usage can be attributed to diminishing value for users of these products.”

Social and Daily Habit apps dominate time spent on Mobile

Looking into 2016’s most notable categories, here’s how time-spent trends shook out:

2016: The Year Social ate Media and Telcos: Time spent in Social and Messaging apps grew by an astounding 394% over the last year, proving to be the driver that helped mobile achieve its year-over-year time-spent growth of 69%. This is a result of consumers using their social and messaging apps as their voice and video calling utilities, as well as the phenomenon we callCommuntainment. With news and magazines sessions down 5 per cent and Music, Media and users continue Entertainment up only 1per cent, it’s safe to say that Social has absorbed the media industry.

Sticky Apps tied to daily habits: Business and Finance (up 43per centin time-spent) and Sports (up 25per centin time-spent) categories were immune to growth decay because they are intrinsically centered around mobile activities and rely on real time data. We anticipate further growth in these categories as to shift daily habits away from traditional media channels, i.e., watching live sports, market reports and the morning news on their TVs, to the apps on their phones.

Video Killed the Gaming Star: Gaming, the app category formerly known as “the darling of the mobile industry,” saw time-spent decline by 4per centyear-over-year. Users are increasingly comfortable paying their way through games, with the mobile gaming industry seeing a strong increase in revenuesaccordingto Apple’s latest App Store report. Additionally, gaming remains a hit-driven industry. This year’s first “hit”, Pokemon Go, faded relatively fast, as consumers lost interest in the game, only returning for marquee holiday events. Another notable hit, Super Mario Run, was released too late in the year to make a difference for the overall engagement numbers.

Phabletsreign supreme

As forecasted in last year’s report, we have seen phablet devices becoming the dominant form factor across the globe, capturing 41% of market share. While our prediction didn’t completely come to fruition, users continue to find value in the larger screen size. This directly correlates to the growth in media consumption and social engagement app categories. As less mature smartphone markets adopt larger phones, Phablet share will continue to eat away at medium phones and completely eliminate small phones.