India tops the charts as fastest-growing app market in the world: Adjust-FB report

India has emerged as the fastest-growing region in the world, along with education and business as the fastest-growing app verticals, according to the Mobile App Growth Report, released by Adjust, the global app marketing platform, in collaboration with Facebook.

Charting app growth and retention trends in 2020, the report demonstrates the extraordinary resilience of the app economy, with the strongest growth in APAC, MENA and South America. Gaming is the world’s fastest-growing vertical, led by Argentina, while India tops the charts as the fastest-growing region.

Using its own Growth Score, Adjust created a global map to highlight mobile app trends outside big, mature markets — showing app marketers where the highest growth potential can be found.

“Now more than ever, mobile marketers need a roadmap to identify just the right users, in just the right locales, at just the right points in their journey,” said Andrey Kazakov, Chief Operations Officer of Adjust. “Adjust’s data, coupled with Facebook’s insights into user preferences and actions, enables marketers to target and retain their most highest-value users.”

Highlights on standout verticals and regions include:

India is growing the fastest, with ever-increasing mobile penetration. Education is the fastest-growing app vertical, while Entertainment is the one to watch as a highly competitive market in streaming and Over the Top (OTT) media emerges. After a mid-table finish last year, India tops the charts as the fastest-growing app market. According to figures from the Mobile Marketing Association India, the country hosts 700 million unique mobile phone subscribers, comprising 451 million internet users. With such a vast market of existing customers, and ever increasing mobile penetration, there is ample room for growth for home-grown enterprises and international brands.

Gaming wins globally: Following on from the findings in Adjust’s Mobile App Trends last year, games were the top-ranking vertical. This is largely due to innovative business models like hyper casual, instantly playable games that are designed to engage with simplistic, satisfying mechanics.

Entertainment has grown rapidly, and subscriptions are the trend to watch. According to research conducted by Adjust, using Apptopia data, nearly 80 per cent of the top 225 apps in the Google Play Store and nearly 50 per cent of the top 225 apps in the App Store are subscription-based.

Korea and Vietnam top the charts for e-commerce, as the two fastest-growing markets in mobile-first commerce. For Vietnam, in particular, apps there have massive room to grow, building in untapped markets with eager consumers. China, Egypt and Colombia are also strong performers in e-commerce.

Equipped with these insights, marketers can architect an effective strategy around markets where they can grow their apps most successfully. More importantly, they can create hyper targeted and personalised customer experiences.

“The mobile app is truly a global business. It’s easy to start because of the low barrier to entry, but also easy to fail if you do not understand the markets and users well,” said Bryan Wang, Director of Marketing Science, Greater China Region & Gaming at Facebook. “The data and insight in the Mobile App Growth Report can help app advertisers identify their new market entry strategies and enable the winning tactics effectively.”

Methodology

The Adjust Mobile App Growth Report, supported by Facebook, draws on data from 25,000 apps released on the App and Google Play Stores in 2019 and 2020 combined, across nearly 250 countries and 12 industry verticals to reveal how well the apps have performed. The Growth Score is calculated by dividing the total app installs per month by the number of monthly active users (MAU) for each vertical and country in the Adjust dataset to reveal the rate of growth from installs relative to the MAU base.

Adjust has reiterated that all data for this report comes solely from its platform, and that no Facebook data was utilised for this report.