Welcome again to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch collection that recaps the newest in cellular OS information, cellular functions and the general app financial system.
The app trade continues to develop, with a document 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in international shopper spend in 2020. Consumers final yr additionally spent 3.5 trillion minutes utilizing apps on Android gadgets alone. And within the U.S., app utilization surged forward of the time spent watching dwell TV. Currently, the common American watches 3.7 hours of dwell TV per day, however now spends 4 hours per day on their cellular gadgets.
Apps aren’t only a option to go idle hours — they’re additionally a giant enterprise. In 2019, mobile-first corporations had a mixed $544 billion valuation, 6.5x greater than these and not using a cellular focus. In 2020, buyers poured $73 billion in capital into cellular corporations — a determine that’s up 27% year-over-year
This Week in Apps will quickly be a publication! Sign up right here: techcrunch.com/newsletters
Android App Bundles at the moment are going to be required
This week Google introduced it is going to require new apps to be revealed utilizing the Android App Bundle as of August 2021. The firm first launched the Android App Bundle commonplace, which replaces the APK, in May 2018 as a part of its trendy improvement push. Since then, nearly all of the highest 1,000 apps and video games have converted to AABs together with these from corporations like Adobe, Duolingo. Gameloft, Netflix, reBus, Rainy, and Twitter. Today, there are over 1 million apps utilizing AAB in manufacturing.
AABs remedy some issues with the growing older APK commonplace, significantly round bigger apps and video games. With AABs, builders don’t need to create an APK that incorporates all the pieces for each kind of Android gadget. They provide a option to shortly and extra effectively obtain the belongings wanted for a specific gadget, and so they accomplish that in a method that focuses on getting the consumer or participant to the app or sport’s content material as quick as potential.
But not everybody agrees the change is for the higher. Those who make the most of APK Hosting websites like APKMirror or APKPure to obtain and share apps fear that the shift to AAB is a option to power customers to make use of the Play Store as a substitute of options. Meanwhile, Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney — who’s taking up tech giants over their alleged app retailer monopolies with each lawsuits and lobbying — identified that the transfer away from the extra open APK commonplace is about locking customers into Google Play.
Consumer Spending on apps hits document $64.9B within the first half of the yr
Consumer spending in cellular apps hit a document $64.9 billion throughout the first half of 2021, in response to preliminary information from app retailer intelligence agency Sensor Tower. This determine represents a 24.8% improve in spending seen throughout each the App Store and Google Play, in contrast with the year-ago interval. But whereas trade specialists consider the accelerated shift to cellular fueled by the pandemic is a development that may proceed, it’s value noting that — regardless of the brand new document — the expansion price for shopper spending has barely slowed, and the obtain progress slowed extra dramatically.
From the primary half of 2019 to the primary half of 2020, shopper spending on cellular apps grew 28.4% from $40.5 billion to $52 billion, for comparability — slower than the 24.8% seen within the present interval.
Platforms: Apple
✨ Apple launched the general public betas of iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and watchOS 8. Although builders already had entry to early builds, this week was the primary time the general public may get their palms on Apple’s newest software program earlier than its official launch this fall. One of the most important modifications in iOS…
