The global app economy is estimated to grow by $5 trillion over the next five years, according to a new report by App Annie.
The mobile marketing company estimates that last year, the app economy – defined as all mobile app stores, in-app advertising and mobile commerce – was worth $1.3 trillion.
This massive sum was driven by 3.4bn people spending 1.6 trillion hours in apps, which equates to an average of $379 per person in 2016, across all forms of monetisations.
And this is expected to reach $6.3 trillion by 2021, driven primarily by the potential user base almost doubling
The company predicts that this user base will grow from 3.4bn in 2016 to 6.3bn in 2021.
In addition to this, App Annie expects time spent in apps will also continue to increase, from 1.6 trillion hours in 2016 to 3.5 trillion in 2021.
The mobile marketing firm also predicts that some western economies will continue to lag behind many Asia-Pacific countries in the shift to mobile, in terms of activity, consumer spend and ad spend.
App Annie said: “Western economies are somewhat constrained by legacy systems such as banking, payment transfers, food purchases and an overconcentration of wealth among their older customer base.
“Developing economies in Asia-Pacific are building infrastructure and app habits, highlighted by Chinese chat giant WeChat, which have little to no such legacy “drag” effect on the growth of their app economy.”
Check out the full report here
.