App Annie now tracks Android apps in China

Market researcher App Annie announced today that it will now be tracking over 5,000 Android apps in China. It reports that 10 percent of the top 1,000 apps in China are mobile games.

The Google Play Store is still noticeably absent in China, though it’s currently installed on about 3.6 percent of the phones according to a chart by market analyst Newzoo. Though Google has been rumored to be in talks with NetEase to bring the Play Store back to China, in the meantime, the country has a famously fragmented mobile marketplace for Android users. There is a myriad of different app stores to choose from. Newzoo reports that Tencent’s MyApp dominates, as it’s installed on over 25 percent of users’ phones. After that are 360 Mobile Assistant, Xiaomi App Store, and Baidu Mobile Assistant.

App Annie senior vice president of research Danielle Levitas says that they’ll be tracking Android usage across all the app stores that Chinese users peruse. This will give people a broad understanding of the market.

The mobile market is projected to reach $189 billion by 2020. In China, the amount of money people spend via the mobile ecosystem are huge. These new analytics could help app developers target a market that’s willing to spend a lot of money on mobile. App Annie found that consumers and marketers spent $790 billion in 2016 and estimates that mobile spend will grow to $2.59 trillion in 2021.

“This launch allows App Annie’s customers to understand how consumers are using apps on Android devices in China — building on our existing iOS App Store and iOS usage data for China,” said Levitas in an email. “Given the unique nature of app stores in China — 100-plus Android stores — at this time we are not selling app store estimates for these 100-plus Android stores.”

The new insights will gather data on statistics such as daily and monthly active users, as well as cross-app usage and data usage. The data will also contribute to apps’ global rankings.

“Something particularly interesting we have seen is that consumers in China on average have 40+ apps on their devices vs. 35 on average in U.S.,” said Levitas. “Given the dominance of WeChat and the fact that this one app allows its users to do so many things  — order food, pay someone, social or comms, get a ride, etc — it seems surprising that users in this country use more apps on average than those in U.S. or many Western countries.”