According to numbers gathered by Yahoo's analytics firm Flurry, mobile app usage is starting to slow down across the board, and mobile games are one of the categories feeling that change the most.
While data can vary from firm to firm, keeping an eye on the periodic reports shared by companies like Flurry can help game developers be aware of changes in the way players interact with mobile games.
Flurry’s mobile year in review says that the number of mobile app sessions, or how many times people open and use apps on their smart devices, has increased by 6 percent overall, down just slightly from the 11 percent increase reported in 2016.
Shopping apps saw the greatest session growth with a 54 percent increase. Likewise, music, media and entertainment, business and finance, utilities and productivity, and news and magazine apps all also saw usage growth last year as well.
Five app categories however, including mobile games, saw a decrease in sessions between 2016 and 2017. Though specific usage numbers aren’t provided, Flurry says that the mobile game category dropped 16 percent from the numbers reported in 2017. The year prior, 2016, also saw a similar decrease in the overall number of gameplay sessions.
Flurry does note that, as indicated an earlier mid-year report, the number of individual sessions are decreasing but look to be growing in length. That June report saw that the average mobile gameplay session increased to 7 minutes and 6 seconds at that point in 2016, up from the 6 minutes and 22 seconds tracked in 2016. However, no data on full-year session length was provided in the company’s end-of-year report.
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