With 2012’s recent end, reports are being released left and right, focused on looking back at the results from the year that has passed and seeing what 2013 might have to offer. For marketers, it has been made quite clear that 2012 was a year of mobile explosion, and mobile devices have become the place to advertise. With the immense number of mobile device activations that occurred just this Christmas, it is clear that 2013’s marketing performance will rely heavily on mobile as well. Part of what has made mobile such a successful marketing platform thus far is the use of mobile apps for advertising purposes, and marketing within these apps has grown quite impressively as well. This growth can be credited to the increased downloading of mobile apps by consumers.
A recent report from a company called Flurry, which specializes in application marketing tactics and solutions, shows just how greatly app downloads have skyrocketed. In reviewing the last week of the year, the company finds that mobile app downloads have been significantly heavy.
The most important week of the year for app makers is the final week of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Starting with Christmas Day, the largest single device activation day of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is marked by significantly elevated device activations and app downloads. This is the primary reason why companies jockey to rank well leading up to Christmas Day itself. This report reveals that the last week of 2012 was the largest week for both new device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history.
The last week of 2012 shows marketers that mobile app marketing should be a consideration in any good marketing campaign. During this final week, the company estimated that over 50 million devices of both iOS and Android operating systems were activated, and with all of these activations came about 1.76 billion application downloads worldwide. For the U.S., marketers can get excited, for the country accounted for a huge number of these downloads, with 604 million app downloads.
Luckily for readers of the report, Flurry also offered a prediction of their own regarding app use in the coming months. The company said that in 2013 the trend of weeks with at least a billion downloads to become quite common. They say that worldwide, mobile will see over two billion downloads per week by the last quarter of the year. Below is their actual statement from the report summary that details their forecasting for the near future.
Looking forward to 2013, Flurry expects the trend of one-billion-download weeks to become the norm, and that the industry will surpass the two-billion download week during Q4. Following a year where Google and Apple drove unprecedented adoption of mobile devices, Facebook declared itself a “mobile” company, and Amazon and Microsoft both made significant investments into mobile computing, we look forward to continued record-breaking adoption of smart devices and applications. Happy New Year from everyone at Flurry.
