Sensor Tower analyses data from Apple and Google’s app stores to understand which apps, games and companies are the most successful.
Tag: Sensor Tower
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Report: TikTok generated $2.3bn of in-app spending in 2021
The music industry still tends to think of TikTok as an ad-supported business. However, the company’s revenues from consumer spending are growing impressively.
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TikTok roundup: ByteDance revs, external apps and German charts
There are several interesting stories about TikTok today, so we’re bundling them up, starting with The Information’s report that parent company ByteDance is on course to grow its revenues.
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TikTok gets five-day premiere of David Guetta and Sia’s Let’s Love
A moment of relief for TikTok executives: a music story making headlines, rather than the latest revelation about the company’s potential sale or ban in the US. TikTok is getting a “five-day premiere” of the new single from David Guetta and Sia, and it’s a useful pointer to how the app is developing as a platform for music marketing.
‘Let’s Love’ comes out on Friday (11 September) on streaming services, but a 15-second edit will be available for TikTok users to make videos with from today, as part of an official #LetsLove challenge that’s being promoted by Guetta through his TikTok profile. “Can we go over difficult times together? Use the #letslove to show us how you stay positive: fitness, dance, drawing… it’s your time to shine,” is how the challenge words it.
It’s one of the most high-profile examples of a track (or rather, a portion of it) being made available on TikTok before its official release date, with the aim of whipping up the kind of virality that will generate an early spike in streams elsewhere come Friday. We’ll see today whether the label (or, indeed, TikTok itself) is putting some marketing budget into getting popular influencers on the app to join the challenge.
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PubG Mobile, the world’s top mobile game, made $208.8m in July
The amount of money sloshing around in the mobile games industry continues to startle. According to analytics firm Sensor Tower, the top mobile game in July 2020 was PubG Mobile, published by Tencent.
It generated $208.8m in user spending via in-app purchases on Google and Apple’s app stores that month.
Comparison time: Tencent Music generated less than that ($186.6m) from music subscription revenues in the entire second quarter of this year.
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TikTok rivals continue to see spike in US downloads
Events around TikTok and its proposed ban in the US are moving so fast, any data on how consumers are responding risks being out of date as soon as it’s published. Still, Sensor Tower has some new numbers on how TikTok’s rivals are benefitting from the uncertainty.
“As talk of a ban ramped up from mere conjecture during the week of July 27, four of the largest challengers contending to be the top social video-sharing app in the US saw their installs collectively grow 361 percent compared to the week before,” reported the app-analytics research company.
Those four rivals cited are Triller, Zynn, Dubsmash and Byte, which together saw nearly 1.5m US installs in the week of 27 July. “During this time, Triller reached No. 1 among the top free iPhone apps in 50 markets including the US on August 1,” added Sensor Tower.
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Roposo, Zili and Dubsmash capitalising on TikTok India ban
We know that TikTok’s ban in India has led to a spike in downloads of rival apps, many of them homegrown. Now analytics firm Sensor Tower has offered some figures to quantify that spike.
It reckons that three of the key apps, Roposo, Zili and Dubsmash, saw their first-time installs grow by 155% in the three weeks following the ban in June.
“Since the ban, Roposo, Zili, and Dubsmash have collectively generated 21.8 million downloads in India, reaching 13 percent of TikTok’s installs in the country for the first half of 2020,” it explained. By its calculations, Roposo has now been installed 71m times since its launch, while Zili has 51m installs and Dubsmash 30.4m.
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ByteDance’s music app Resso installed nearly 3m times in India in June
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance test-launched its Resso music streaming app in India and Indonesia last year – we put it through its paces in December, ahead of its formal launch in India in March 2020.
Unlike TikTok, Resso escaped the recent ban on apps of Chinese origin in India, but how is it doing? News site Quartz has some stats courtesy of mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower.
It claims that Resso did nearly 3m installs in India in June, and that having seen sharp month-on-month growth that month and in May, it has now been installed 10.6m times in total globally. Around 74% of those downloads are from India.
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TikTok was world’s most downloaded non-gaming app in June
Analytics firm Sensor Tower has published its latest rankings for mobile apps, reporting that TikTok was the most downloaded non-gaming app globally in June 2020, ahead of Zoom and Facebook.
The company claims that TikTok was downloaded more than 87m times across Apple and Google’s app stores, up 52.7% year-on-year. However, its top two markets – India (accounting for 18.8% of TikTok’s downloads in June) and the US (8.7%) – are the ones where it’s currently facing big challenges, as we reported yesterday.
Sensor Tower also estimates that TikTok was the top grossing non-game app globally in June, ahead of YouTube and Tinder, with more than $90.7m of user spending. 89% of this revenue came from its Chinese version Douyin – and it’s only user spending, not advertising revenues.
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Report: global app spending was $50bn in first half of 2020
Could a global pandemic take the shine off the growth in the amount of money people spend on and within mobile apps? It could not.
“Consumers spent a combined total of $50.1 billion worldwide on the App Store and Google Play in the first half of 2020,” claimed app analytics firm Sensor Tower. “This was 23.4 percent more than the $40.6 billion we estimate mobile users spent across both stores during the same period in 2019. Previously, revenue had increased 20 percent between the first half of 2018 and 2019.”
So growth is accelerating, even though it’s now 12 years since the launch of Apple and Google’s app stores. Note, Sensor Tower’s figures are about spending, not overall revenues – they don’t include advertising, nor do they include money spent outside those App Store payment systems (Spotify subscriptions, Uber ride fees, Deliveroo payments etc).
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Report: US iPhone app spending grew by 23% in 2017
Sensor Tower is the latest research firm putting out numbers on the apps market for 2017, this time focusing on iPhone app spending in the US.
It claims that the average amount spent per active iPhone in the US was $58 last year, up 23% from 2016’s figure of $46. This covers spending on premium (pay up-front) apps as well as in-app purchases, although not spending through associated credit cards – for example in apps like Amazon and Uber.
Or, in a music context, it counts spending on streaming subscriptions when handled through in-app purchases, but not when the payment is through other off-Apple means.