A Peek into the Android App Market Before COVID-19
It is an indisputable fact that the emergence of smartphones has reshaped the narratives of many things in human endeavour and generally modern cultures, smartphones offer almost limitless possibilities right in the palm of our hands as we can get nearly anything done with just a few taps on our screens.
Aside from durable hardware, it is true that a smartphone is as good as its software, if smartphones were magic wands, mobile apps would be the magic spells, these days there is almost an app for everything.
In the short history of smartphones and mobile apps, there have been 2 major players leading the smartphone technology, namely Android Inc (Google owned) and iOS (Apple Inc. owned).
At 71% Android has been leading the Mobile Operating System Market Share Worldwide since 2009 and as recent as August 2022 (source — © StatCounter).
This report aims at telling the story of the Google Playstore as the number one android apps market, this data analysis reports answers some insightful questions about android apps on Google Playstore before the COVID-19 years, effectively from 2010–2018.
PS: This analysis does not cover the complete Playstore app population but is a worthy sample of over 10,000 apps. The data for this analysis can be found on Kaggle alongside the programming R-script used for analysis.
The interactive visual report of this project can be found here for in-depth insights and comparison. While you are yet to do that allow me to share with you the major events of this market story below;
ANDROID MARKET SIZE & ADOPTION
As seen in the chart above the android app market recorded linear growth over the years with a 71% change between 2016 and 2018 with a total of above 10k apps published.
Consequently, over 146 billion apps have been downloaded in a period of 8 years with significant growth from 2017- 2018.
QUICK PLAYSTORE MATHS
Above is a quick stats on the total apps published(10,357), total app category(34), total app genres(120), and total installation(146.6 billion+ downloads).
APP PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
The following visuals will share insight into how different apps perform agast each other based on featured criteria and metrics but first let’s see how the app categories performed.
The highest number of published apps came from the Family category.
The highest number of downloaded apps came from the Game category, this would be quite expected as the population of young people using smartphones increases and their affinity towards video gaming can only be enabled by technology such as flexible smartphones.
MOST DOWNLOADED APP
You may be wondering which app came out as the most downloaded app in this analysis, it's not hard to guess, Google Photos came out most downloaded, in fact, the only apps performing above 3 billion downloads were all Google apps.
The theory behind these numbers might be that some of them come in pre-installed or are part of the requisite apps for the operating system to function optimally.
The runner-ups either fell into communications or gaming categories which rightly to the category insights earlier stated.
MOST DOWNLOADED APP
What would make an app rank the most based on the number of reviews?
That should be a worthy question for another analysis, but the findings from this analysis present the most reviewed apps on Playstore in the visuals below —
Furthermore to answer the question of why my theory would be that the most reviewed apps be assessed based on user rating and sentiment analysis to draw more insights.
CORRELATION ANALYSIS
The only positive correlation between the variables of this dataset is the relationship between size and rating as shown below
CONCLUSION
This analysis has been able to bring some first-hand information on the pre covid years of android apps on Playstore, as earlier stated, the insights from this analysis is is based on a worthy sample, thus this might not statistically reflect the actual state of the Paystore app market up to date.
But more or less this is a peek into the probable state of the android market and as such can serve as a guide to further comprehensive research that can be useful in marketing analytics and feasibility studies for product designs.
Above all, I thank you for your patience to read this to the end, do follow me for more related content.
Cheers!
