As per a recent report from Flurry Analytics, which is part of the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite, mobile usage has continued exhibiting signs of growth. However, the growth appeared to slow somewhat as the market appeared to be leaning towards maturity in 2016. Interestingly, 2016 was also the last year of the first decade since their conception, for mobile apps.

And Flurry’s data is anything but not reliable. The analytics firms bases its findings on data obtained from a massive 2.1 billion devices and 3.2 trillion sessions. As such, it is probably able to present a pretty accurate picture of trends across mobile and application usage.

Speaking on the topic, Simon Khalaf, SVP, Yahoo said,

Over the last year, the Flurry footprint grew to track more than 940,000 applications, across 2.1 billion devices, in 3.2 trillion sessions. In this context, we define app usage as a user opening an app and recording what we call a “session,” as well as the amount of time spent in the application.

According to the report, 2016 saw the overall app usage grew by 11%. On the other hand, the amount of time-spent in-app registered a much more significant growth of 69%. This is evidence that all those memes of people with their eyes glued to screens are at least partially true. 

Interestingly, while some of the previous years saw growth across all app categories, 2016 witnessed a more focused rate of increase. Initially, app growth had occurred at the expense of time people spent in watching the television or browsing the Internet however, there are only so many hours in the day and now, mobile applications are competing amongst themselves to grab the most eyeballs. 

Meanwhile, messaging and Social applications remained at the top of the category.

While Messaging and Social applications drove year-over-year session growth at 44%, the Personalization category gave up a staggering 46% in session usage. This steep decline in usage can be attributed to diminishing value for users of these products.

A diagram showing the categorical breakdown of growth of time spent over apps in different categories is as follows:

While Messaging and Social applications registered a huge boom — expected, we have all been using far too much social media for our own good — games surprisingly registered a negative growth, denoting that popular attention was slowly drifting away.

This is a result of consumers using their social and messaging apps as their voice and video calling utilities, as well as the phenomenon we call Communitainment. With news and magazines sessions down 5% and Music, Media and users continue Entertainment up only 1%, it’s safe to say that Social has absorbed the media industry.

And so it has. Meanwhile, categories like Business and Finance and Sports are expected to grow even further as the section of user who still depend upon the telly invariably make the shift to smartphone applications sooner or later.

Interestingly, the negative growth in gaming, which saw a decrease of 4 percent year-over-year was actually good news. Why? Well, it occurred because more customers were simply paying their way through games instead of sticking around playing it. And that was great, because it drove revenue to the gaming industry. Meanwhile, Pokemon Go and Super Mario, both failed to leave any lasting impacts despite being instant hits at the time of their launch.

Finally, shopping applications also registered a healthy growth.

 Shopping apps grew 31% in time-spent. A report by Adobe shows a very healthy growth in online sales, with Amazon grabbing 38% of holiday sales transactions from November 1 through December 29, 2016. This growth significantly benefited from mobile and its apps, which, unlike the desktop, have captured impulse buys.

And impulse buy is rapidly becoming a very important factor, make no mistake. In hindsight, I think that the strategy that involved offering massive discounts and sales on the part of e-commerce retailers may have kicked in slightly late. In fact, I often witness a mentality that “online portals offer things at cheaper prices than brick and mortar stores” amongst many of my peers, when that is not always true.

So maybe, all that money burned over discounts and sales is actually having an impact. And of course, the variety and the convenience of placing orders from your home has an effect too.

Finally, phablet devices continued registering growth at the cost of medium and small sized phones. The trend is expected to continue in the near future as well, until at least small mobile phones are totally eliminated.

At the other end of the spectrum, full sized tablets were also unable to recoup their losses and registered a small decline of 1 percent.

Meanwhile, while all these trends could signal that the app market is reaching maturity, Flurry believes that there is still quite a lot of money to be made.

As the iPhone celebrates its first decade, the mobile industry has grown into a dog-eat-dog world. The decelerating rate of growth could signal market maturity, saturation or simply the end of the app gold rush. But let us put things in perspective. The gold rush in California ended in 1855. A lot of wealth has been generated since then.

So yeah, no need for app developers to look for alternate careers just yet. The market is expected to survive and thrive even as the first decade of its life, has drawn to a close. And with the advent of new technologies like VR, AR and others, reports like this could just have some all new app categories, by this time next year.