The mobile app ecosystem is evolving with categories such as job portals, social and content platform and utility and super apps recording higher growth, according to a report by Truecaller.
The Mobile App Growth Trends report leverages Truecaller SDK’s insights to help enterprises and startups get a deep dive into growth trends from 2021. It demonstrates how the ecosystem is evolving and draws inferences to build for the next phase of growth.
According to the report, job portals witnessed the highest growth in 2021 at 386 per cent. The growth indictes an increase in usage and adoption by new/existing users. Apart from job portals, social & content platforms (291 per cent), utility & super apps (216 per cent), movies & events listings (191 per cent ) and eCommerce (189 per cent) were the top five categories in terms of growth. Fantasy & sports platforms recorded a 171 per cent growth, followed by automarket & OEM at 152 per cent, gaming & streaming at 146 per cent and healthcare and fitness at 141 per cent.
On adoption, e-commerce was the most popular category followed by health & fitness.
Mapping growth across cities, Tier 1 cities witnessed a 212 per cent growth in mobile apps, while Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities recorded 215 per cent and 29 per cern growth, respectively. Kolkata witnessed the highest growth among Tier 1 cties at 248 per cent.
Job portals
Indian job portals recorded a 108 per cent growth in website traffic – solely during the second half of 2021
“nterestingly, Tier 2 cities were the key growth market compared to prominent Tier 1 cities. The numbers also indicate that post the second wave of Covid-19, confidence is back in the job markets,” the report said.
Tier 1 cities recorded a 98 per cent growth during H2 2021 while Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities recorded a 122 per cent and 110 per cent growth.
E-commerce apps
E-commerce apps observed increased traffic during festivals. The apps tend to offer many festive deals/sales during October (Dussehra + PreDiwali), and correspondingly 74 per cent more traffic to e-commerce apps was observed during this time in 2021.
Overall, 2021 saw an increase of 189 per cent in traffic compared to 2020.
Tier 1 cities witnessed a 311 per cent growth while Tier 2 cities witnessed a 346 per cent growth. Tier 3 cities recorded a 92 growth in traffic for such apps overall.
Gaming and social apps
The Fantasy Gaming category saw a jump in traffic by 469 per cent in September, October and November, driven by the second leg of IPL and ICC T20 World Cup.
The growth was consistent across all the three tiers of cities averaging more than 400 per cent growth in IPL second half and ICC T20 World Cup.
The category witnessed maximum adoption in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, with Sundays having the most engagement rate and Monday the lowest.
Social apps continued the trend from 2020 and retained the second spot in terms of overall adoption, and overall growth of 292 per cent from previous years.
“The second half of 2021 with festivities saw a jump of 10-12 per cent traffic compared to other days in a year,” as per the report.
Further, 2021 also saw Tier 2 cities wtienssing significant growth and closely combating with Tier 1 cities.
Travel and Hospitality
Travel & ticketing apps saw ~42 per cent drop in user traffic during the second wave of the pandemic. However, overall in 2021, Tier 2 cities witnessed a growth of 216 per cent.
“The Travel and Hospitality industry saw a downtrend during the Covid impacted months. However, it gradually got back to pace towards the end of Q3 and Q4,” the report said.
“Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities gained momentum in the usage of Travel and Hospitality platforms post the pandemic months, indicating users’ increased confidence and propensity to travel,” it added.
Priyam Bose, Global Head, GTM and Developer Products, Truecaller for Business, said, “We partner with businesses & startups to enable a seamless verification experience for their users with our verification SDK solution while helping them improve the user funnel for mobile products. With our learnings from 2021, this report is a step toward bringing more insights and learning to the product and developer community in India.”
Published on
May 18, 2022
