India's app usage is growing at 43% year-on-year: Study

India’s app usage is growing at 43% year-on-year, with music, media and entertainment applications witnessing the biggest increase at 188%, a study by Yahoo-owned research firm Flurry said on Thursday.
Phablet is the most preferred mobile device with a 61% market share in India. Time spent in messaging and on social apps grew by an impressive 52% across the country and 44% globally.
“As smartphones celebrate their first decade, the mobile app industry has grown into a dog-eat-dog world. We are excited to see what app developers do in the next decade and watch which industry they choose to disrupt, again,” said Christopher Klotzbach, director, Flurry from Yahoo, in a statement.
Personalisation apps saw the biggest usage decrease at -32%. This decrease is due to operating systems integrating the functionality of these apps natively.
In 2016, shopping apps continued to gain popularity, growing 31% globally and 12% in India. Gaming, the app category known as “the darling of the mobile industry,” saw time spent decline by 4% globally and a small growth in India of just 8%, the findings showed.
While business and finance apps grew 176% year-on-year, the utilities and productivity apps grew 99% year-on-year.
The ‘State of the App Nation in India’ study is backed by data gleaned from over 940,000 applications, across 2.1 billion global devices from across the world, and the 58,000 apps, across 147 million devices from India, that use Flurry.