App usage and rev­enues are grow­ing to record-break­ing lev­els on all the major mobile plat­forms. How­ev­er, research has revealed telling sen­ti­ments from con­sumers who are begin­ning to use and pur­chase cer­tain apps less, show­ing that brands need to ensure they aren’t annoy­ing con­sumers, and instead to deliv­er con­tin­ued inno­va­tion with app prod­ucts in order to win long-term loy­al­ty.

One of the most sig­nif­i­cant pieces of mar­ket­ing data to emerge in 2015 was that Apple’s App Store rev­enues rose a stun­ning 50 per­cent in 2014 alone, with end of year rev­enues top­ping $10 bil­lion (to put this fig­ure into con­text, total App Store earn­ings in the pre­vi­ous five years num­bered $15 bil­lion alto­geth­er). New Year’s Day 2015 inci­den­tal­ly, broke the record as the sin­gle biggest day ever in App Store sales his­to­ry.

Put sim­ply, the app mar­ket is boom­ing not just in pop­u­lar­i­ty, but in the num­ber of apps that are win­ning rev­enues.

The change is affect­ing mar­kets on both sides of the Atlantic: accord­ing to eMar­keter, More than 80 mil­lion con­sumers in the U.S. will pay for mobile apps at least once this year, rep­re­sent­ing 33.3 per­cent of all mobile users. In the UK, research by app devel­op­er Con­jure, sur­vey­ing 2,000 British adults on their app usage, habits, and per­cep­tions, has revealed valu­able insights on what con­sumers are expect­ing from the apps they are using.

Mobile App Revenues Key Stats

Mobile smart­phone and tablet usage is still grow­ing, accord­ing to eMar­keter:

• 93 per­cent, or 80.1 mil­lion U.S. smart­phone users, and 90 per­cent of tablet users will down­load and install at least one app this year.
• 35.8 per­cent of all U.S. smart­phone users will pur­chase apps in 2015, a fig­ure which totals 65.2 mil­lion peo­ple.
• 44 per­cent of U.S. tablet users, 60.9 mil­lion peo­ple, will pur­chase apps in 2015.

Con­jure’s sur­vey, which account­ed for the entire­ty of the UK pop­u­la­tion, revealed that:

• The aver­age Brit spent 24 per­cent more on brand­ed apps in the 12 months pre­ced­ing Novem­ber 2014, amount­ing to a total aver­age spend of of £89 annu­al­ly, ris­ing from the £72.30 they spent in the pre­vi­ous year.
• iOS users once again pro­vide to be the biggest spenders. Con­sumers who only used iOS had high­er over­all spend­ing, at £89.36 annu­al­ly.
• Con­sumers who only used Android spent £62.80 annu­al­ly – a dif­fer­ence of £26.56.
• Devel­op­ers, how­ev­er, would be wise to work on apps for the Android plat­form, with the sur­vey reveal­ing the OS to be the dom­i­nant plat­form, with 49.6 per­cent of the over­all mobile OS UK mar­ket share.
• iOS still had a healthy mar­ket share of 38 per­cent, while Win­dows Phone showed healthy gains with 15 per­cent of the over­all mar­ket share.

Smart­phone and tablet down­load stats:

• In 2014, UK con­sumers down­loaded an aver­age of 5.5 apps, slight­ly less than 2013’s 5.85 apps, indi­cat­ing a mar­ket that is start­ing to focus on improve­ment rather than growth.
• Tablet pen­e­tra­tion in the UK has con­tin­ued strong­ly, with 61 per­cent of the UK pop­u­la­tion now own­ing a tablet.
• 10.3 per­cent of UK con­sumers now own a smart­watch.
• For Lon­don­ers that fig­ure was much high­er at 17.8 per­cent. (this fig­ure will prob­a­bly be much high­er with the release of Apple Watch).

What Do Consumers Expect From Branded Apps?

Approx­i­mate­ly 1 in 4 con­sumers spent more time using brand­ed apps on their devices in the 2014:

Image Cred­it: Con­jure

Just 11 per­cent of con­sumers spent less time on their devices using brand­ed apps, and over­all this is a pos­i­tive sig­nal, show­ing brands are improv­ing in their abil­i­ty to keep con­sumers engaged via apps.

Brands would do well to heed the feed­back of dis­sat­is­fied con­sumers, those who were spend­ing less time on brand­ed apps:

• 19 per­cent of dis­sat­is­fied con­sumers cit­ed repet­i­tive or irrel­e­vant push noti­fi­ca­tions as one of the pri­ma­ry rea­sons why they were using an app less.
• 11 per­cent of dis­sat­is­fied con­sumers find apps less excit­ing, inter­est­ing, and inno­v­a­tive.

Image Cred­it: Con­jure

Innovation And Revenues

One area that has seen been devel­op­ing in recent years has been in the paid/freemium mod­els, as a means of mon­e­tiz­ing app down­loads.

“Many devel­op­ers have test­ed the paid down­load mod­el against the var­i­ous iter­a­tions of the free model—namely in-app pur­chas­es, sub­scrip­tions and in-app advertising—and on the whole, they’ve found the lat­ter approach to be more lucra­tive,” eMar­keter report­ed.

It shows that app devel­op­ers must con­tin­ue to evolve their prod­uct to adapt to chang­ing con­sumer sen­ti­ments.

With the app mar­kets like­ly to con­tin­ue their mon­u­men­tal rev­enue growth in 2015, these sig­nals from users being turned of app usage should not be under­es­ti­mat­ed. Brands need to con­tin­ue to improve and inno­vate in the app space to engen­der long term cus­tomer loy­al­ty and engage­ment. After all, inno­va­tion is the ingre­di­ent that has been key to the mete­oric growth in the app space.

“Brands still need to think about how they can take advan­tage of the wide range of instru­ments stuffed into the mod­ern smart­phone to wow their users,” accord­ing to Con­jure’s report.

You can down­load Con­jure’s full Apps and Brands Bench­mark Report 2015 here.