Report Methodology

• App store metrics reported in this article are based on data from App Annie Intelligence. Market-level metrics represent the full worldwide geography for both iOS and Google Play.

• App Annie Intelligence is currently available for the iOS App Store and Google Play. It does not currently provide estimates for other app stores, such as the Amazon Appstore. While iOS and Google Play represent a significant portion of the app market in many countries, that is not the case for some countries. For example, China has a number of sizable third-party Android app stores.

• App Annie Intelligence revenue estimates reflect app store revenue earned from paid downloads and in-app purchases. They do not include revenue earned from in-app advertising.

• App Annie Intelligence revenue estimates represent the net revenue that the publishers earned from the app store; they exclude the fees taken out by Apple and Google. Currently, iOS App Store and Google Play each take a 30% cut.

• The app store share of consumer spend on apps is assumed to be a uniform 30% across all countries for both stores.

• The Indexed Downloads metric provides an easy way of comparing different downloads numbers against each other. For example, if Q2 2015 has Indexed Downloads of 100 and Q3 2015 has Indexed Downloads of 200, then Q3 2015 downloads are 200/100 = 2 times as high as Q2 2015 downloads. If Q3 2015 has Indexed Downloads of 80, then Q3 2015 downloads are 80/100 = 80% of Q2 2015 downloads. The same applies to the Indexed Revenue metric.

• In the iOS App Store, a publisher categorizes their app under a Primary Category as well as an optional Secondary Category. All category analysis in the App Annie Index has been conducted based on the app’s Primary Category only. This approach prevents any overlap or duplication among categories, and therefore allows us to size the categories and analyze category share changes properly.

• On Google Play, an app can be categorized under only one category, so there is no overlap across categories.

• In both the iOS App Store and Google Play, a publisher may decide to shift its own existing app from one Primary Category to another Primary Category. In such cases, downloads and revenue for the app in the month in which it is changed are attributed to app’s Primary Category at the end of the month.

• App Annie Usage Intelligence data for smartphones and tablets were derived from mobile usage data collected from a large sample of real-world users, combined with additional proprietary data sets.

• App Annie tracks usage at the device level using a privacy-protective hashed device ID. Data is only reported to third parties in aggregated format.

• For the purposes of this report, an active user is defined as a device having one or more sessions with an app in the time period. A single person may be active on multiple devices in any time period, and will therefore be counted as one user per device in the total active users.

• An iOS session as defined in this report starts when an app connects to the network and ends when at least 5 minutes elapse with no network activity. Session length is computed as the time from the first network connection in a session to the last network connection of that session.

• An Android session as defined in this report is the period for which a user has a given app open in the foreground with the screen on. Background data usage does not contribute to session length.  

• Push notifications are not considered active use and, as a result, do not count towards estimates of users, sessions, or session time.

• Certain trademarks and/or images used in this report may belong to third parties and are the property of their respective owners. App Annie claims no rights in such trademarks or images.

© 2015 App Annie