The Fastest-Growing App Categories in 2015

Over the past few years, smartphones and tablets have completely changed the way we interact with media. We may still be listening to the radio, read the news and or watch television shows, but more and more often we’re doing it on our mobile devices or, to be more precise, within apps.

When the first iPhone was released in 2007, there was no App Store and the idea of a phone doing all of the stuff today’s smartphones are capable of seemed ludicrous to say the least. It was the introduction of apps that really started what we consider the mobile revolution in retrospect. Ever since Apple introduced the App Store in 2008, app usage has been growing and it continues to do so until today. According to Flurry Analytics, a company tracking usage across millions of apps, global app usage increased by 58% in 2015 (compared to 76% in 2014 and 103% in 2013).

Personalization apps (e.g. emoji keyboards or wallpaper apps) were the fastest-growing category in 2015. App sessions (that is the number of times a user opens an app) increased by 332% in this category. News & magazine apps were the second-fastest growing app category in the past 12 months. As smartphone screens keep getting bigger, consumers are increasingly open to consuming content on their mobile devices - a trend that publishers should be ready to take advantage of.