South Korea recorded third place and fifth place globally on GooglePlay and iOS respectively based on amount of profit.
According to App Annie on the 18th, ‘Lineage 2 Revolution’ and ‘Lineage M’ were fourth place and eighth place respectively in 2017 based from a list of game apps based on amount of spending from global consumers.
Lineage M, which was released during the second quarter of 2017, was recorded as the application that had made the highest growth in iOS and GooglePlay during the third quarter of 2017. Number of total downloads of apps globally in 2017 came out to be 175 billion, which is 60% increase from that of 2015. Trend of downloading new apps has stabilized in current markets such as South Korea, U.S., and Japan, and it is shown that mobile apps have deeply rooted in people’s daily lives.
Growth of rising mobile app markets including Brazil and India was visualized in 2017. As number of Smartphone users increased in these markets, number of downloads of apps also jumped by a huge margin.
It was calculated that consumers spent total of $86 billion on apps from iOS and GooglePlay, and this amount is twice more than that of 2015. This amount also corresponds to 135% of profits made by global box offices.
‘KakaoTalk’ was selected as the first place (excluding games) for three years in a row based on amount of spending from consumers within South Korea iOS and GooglePlay in 2017.
Entertainment apps such as ‘Kakao Page’, ‘Melon’, and ‘pooq’ followed KakaoTalk with fourth, fifth, and sixth place respectively, and ‘Netflix’ was seated on the eight place. Date apps such as ‘Amanda’ and ’Noondate’ also placed their names on the list just like the year before.
2017 was a year when growths of Kakao and Naver stood out. Kakao was selected as the publisher (excluding games) that recorded most downloads in South Korea in 2017 by having three of its applications such as ‘KakaoTalk’, ‘Kakao Bank’, and ‘Kakao Taxi’ on the top 10 list of downloads.
Naver was placed second place after Kakao in South Korea by having ‘Naver’ and ‘Snow Selfie Camera App’ on the same list.
A category that had shown most changes in 2017 was financial categories due to aggressive release of payment methods such as P2P payment, Android Pay, and Apple Pay and new services such as online-only banks. Applications related to virtual currency had made rapid growth as price of virtual currencies rose explosively.
Game category placed first place on both iOS and GooglePlay based on downloads and profits. After App Annie analyzed game category, it was shown that China had displayed greatest influence in 2017.
Out of top 10 major mobile app countries during the fourth quarter of 2017, people in China spent more than 200 billion hours on mobile applications which was unrivaled.
Out of these hours, they spent 11% of them on game apps based on Android. App Annie announced that ‘Penta Storm’, which was released by a Chinese game publisher Tencent and serviced in South Korea by Netmarble, was the most played game globally during the fourth quarter of 2017.
Staff Reporter Kim, Siso | siso@etnews.com