Thanks to the emergence of the lockdown era, the use of mobile gaming apps continued to shoot upwards.  Consumer spending in mobile apps have been shooting skywards at $32 billion and $64.9 billion for the first quarter and first half of this year.

What the Lockdown Numbers Reveal

Africa rarely gets mentioned in global app market reports, so it most time presents an impossibility to get exact numbers of what is happening in Africa’s mobile market. Be that as it may, Appsflyer collaborated with Google, and they share some important insights with breath-taking numbers that are worth the wow.

Rwanda was the first country in Africa to impose their lockdown, other African Countries (this is according to those in the report by Appsflyer), later followed the trail; Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria in that order.

As the lockdown progressed with more people spending time at home from Q2 2020, app installations progressed in the same way. This report tracked mobile app activities across Africa’s 3 largest app markets – Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. South Africans’ installations increased by 17% from the previous quarter. Nigerians recorded a 2% increase, and Kenyans, a 9%.

Overall, that is; from the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2021, the African mobile app industry (which is largely android) saw a 41% increase in installations. This was concluded from the analysis of 6,000 apps and 2 billion installations put together from the 3 markets. Nigeria had the highest growth – a 43%, South Africa had 37% and Kenya 29%.

Specifically looking at gaming apps, the performance was a 50% growth between Q1 and Q2 2020, with 14 billion downloads globally, compared to non-gaming apps that came with only some 8% increase.

Yearly Growth of In-app Purchases

Appflyer says it noticed that in-app purchases recorded exponential growth in Q3 of 2020. When compared to Q2 of 2020, a glaring 136% stares one in the face. For the whole of 2020’s revenue, that growth that In-app purchases

came with, accounted for 33% of the total revenue recorded that year. The numbers spill what African consumers spent within apps, from buying new features, to upgrading games. For South Africans, in-app purchasing revenue increased by 213%, Nigerian consumers brought a 141%, and Kenyans brought a 74% increase.

The power of in-app advertising

The report also presented that as much as Africans were glued to their phones, in-app advertising revenue increased in that same vein. Between Q2 2020 to Q1 2021, there was a 167% increment. Also, gaming in-app advertising revenue, increased by 44%, and that of non-gaming apps stood at 40% for Q1 2021, compared to what was obtainable in Q2 2020.