In emerging markets only 30% of app active users come from Google Play
Most people get apps by sharing or #datafree direct download
From my countless business meetings in South Africa this year it became very apparent that most industry professionals are not aware the second most popular smartphone app in South Africa is SHAREit, as reported by AppAnnie the industry’s trusted global app market data company.
Whats is SHAREit?
SHAREit enables seamless high speed device-to-device sharing of all types of media files and apps without consuming any data charges. The app has over 500 million downloads on the Google Play Store and 8 million user ratings.
Smartphone users in South Africa use SHAREit to share media files, documents and apps between each other to save data cost. Transferring media files via WhatsApp or downloading from from the internet costs precious data.
In our survey to understand the App install problem in Africa we discovered that 96% of people had SHAREit installed and 90% of people regularly shared installed apps, both to get apps from and share apps to other people.
Anecdotally we’ve been told it’s common practise for one person in a friend or family group to download a latest app update from Google Play then share it with others to save them the download data cost.
Makes perfect sense when you are data poor.
#datafree Moya Messenger downloads
We recently launched the #datafree Moya Messenger app in South Africa to enable no data cost text messaging that works even when people have no airtime or data balance on their prepaid SIM card.
Moya experienced viral growth to 100,000 monthly active users eight weeks after launch.
All sharing of the Moya app refers people to the www.datafree.co.za website, which is also free of data cost as it’s hosted on one of our zero-rated IP addresses (across all four major mobile networks).
Users are given the option to download Moya from our Google Play Store listing or as a #datafree direct download of the Android APK install file.
We track clicks on the app download links and consistently see 60% of total clicks are on the direct #datafree download option.
Only 30% of active users come from Google Play
When we look at active users in the Moya app compared with Moya active installs reported in our Google Play Store developer account we see only 30% of active users come from a Google Play Store download.
In other words aside from the #datafree direct downloads, it’s pretty clear people are sharing the Moya app between each other device-to-device, almost certainly using the SHAREit app.
The recent industry headline news that Fortnite for Android will ditch Google Play Store for Epic’s website was all about saving the 30% app revenue share Epic have to pay Google.
In the case of emerging markets where app revenues are negligible but overcoming the app install problem is a major challenge the lesson is focussing exclusively on Google Play for app distribution can be short sighted.
