In 2020, over 3.5 billion smartphone users are using mobile apps, which translates to over 45% of the world’s population using apps on their smartphones. For years, the annual smartphone shipments have grown at a double digit rate. We recently published list of most popular smartphones by country, you can check if your phone is on the list. With the popularity of smartphones, the user interest in mobile apps and games has also seen constant growth. The mobile app landscape keeps evolving and so does the list of top mobile apps and games. As a result of social distancing and lock-down measures during COVID-19 across the globe, the list of most popular mobile apps and games shows some interesting trends. Let’s have a look at the most popular mobile apps and games worldwide during the month of March 2020.
Looking at mobile apps, with more than 115.2 million downloads, TikTok was the most popular app worldwide in March 2020 nearing 2 billion lifetime installations. TikTok has seen over 98 percent increase from same time last year with over 29% of downloads coming from India and 9% from Brazil. Whatsapp has close to 76 million installations (up 7.7% from last year), which make it the second most installed non-game app worldwide. Once again, India with 33.4% and Brazil with 8.5% had the highest number of Whatsapp installs during March 2020. In addition, top five mobile applications include Zoom, Facebook, and Facebook messenger. On the Apple iOS platform, Zoom has officially taken over TikTok as the most popular app thanks to the increased usage of video conferencing due to social distancing measures during COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, the video streaming platform Netflix has also made it to the top ten list given the increase in home media consumption. See below for a list of top 10 most popular mobile apps (non-game) worldwide based on downloads during March 2020.
Looking at the mobile game downloads, with more than 3.3 billion installations, March 2020 was the best month ever for global mobile game market. With almost 35 million installations, Slap Kings from Lion Studios was the most downloaded mobile game. Almost 13.6 percent of the downloads came from United States and almost 9.4 percent of installations were from India. At the second place, Draw Climber from Voodoo had almost 31.7 million installations, out of which 9.5 percent were from Indonesia and 8.6 percent from Russia. PubG Mobile was the third most downloaded mobile game which represents almost 35.7 percent increase from the month before. In addition, Woodturning and Perfect Cream also made the top five list. With three games in the top 10 most popular games list, month of March 2020 proved to be a great month for game maker Voodoo.
Countries Leading the worldwide mobile apps and games market
Thanks to the increase in smartphone adoption rate and improvements in mobile data speeds, the emerging BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) nations have fueled the global app market. One key contributor to the growth in mobile apps is India’s digitization efforts, also known as the Jio data revolution of 2017. Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecom firm led by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, has been a key enabler of India’s data revolution with dirt cheap high-speed data and free voice calls. According to Report by Kleiner Perkins, India’s monthly wireless data usage rose from 200 million GB a month in June 2016, to 1.3 billion GB a month in March 2017 all thanks to Jio. As a result, India surged ahead with nearly 5 billion app installs compared to 3 billion in U.S.A during the last quarter of 2019. Note that China was excluded from the chart below due to unavailability of Google Play in the country.
The popularity numbers are provided by Sensor Tower’s Store Intelligence platform, which includes unique downloads/installation from the App Store and Google Play worldwide between March 1, 2020 and March 31, 2020. Note that Apple apps and Google pre-installed apps are excluded. Also, the list doesn’t include downloads from third-party Android stores in China or other regions.
I am officially a tech addict and enjoy providing my views on matters related to this industry. I am always interested in trying out new tech gadgets and I have owned multiple smartphones including the legendary HTC One, SGS2, Nexus 4, iPhone 4, 5S, 6S, XR, Note 9. You can ask me any tech related questions in the comment section or on twitter @hookedNav