The golden decade of China's mobile Internet has given birth to countless applications that have changed our lives, including social networking, transportation, payment, etc., which can be said to cover all aspects. So for entrepreneurs, has the ten-year golden period expired, and how should they look for opportunities?
Recently, Huawei Developer Alliance and iResearch Released the "2022 Mobile Application Trend Insight White Paper", which mainly analyzes the development status and trend of the mobile application industry, and analyzes the subdivision industry scenarios such as audio-visual entertainment, communication and social networking, e-commerce life, sports and health, and travel navigation, grasps the development characteristics and trends of the mobile application subdivision industry, and provides reference for the development and operation decisions of the majority of domestic developers. (Source: Huawei Application Market and iResearch Consulting Research Institute)
You can obtain the full version of the white paper, which can be downloaded through the Huawei Developer Alliance Forum
Talk about the segmentation innovation of the stock era
In the mobile application market with a relatively stable traffic pool, with the continuous influx of apps, competition will only become more intense, and such competition will force more vertical and segmented mobile application products to continue to emerge and innovate. Judging from the trend of subdividing the industry in the white paper, each subdivision industry is innovating from different directions such as content, model, service, etc., doing refined operations, and doing explosive models in the field of segmentation.
In the field of audio-visual entertainment, with the rapid development of the short video industry in recent years, the number of daily active users has been rising, and the mainstream short video platforms have rapidly completed the multi-functional and multi-identity conversion from pure entertainment to covering social, cultural communication, and commercialization. At the same time, conflicts with long videos are inevitable, which not only squeezes the user time of long videos, but also is constrained by copyright issues. In 2021, the competition between long and short videos is becoming increasingly fierce, and both sides have to gain user stickiness through innovation.
In order to solve the copyright problem, the short video platform has increased the layout of micro-short dramas, improved the construction of content ecology, and explored new growth points in the market. The white paper also confirms this trend: the innovation hotspot in the field of short video focuses on the branding and serialization of short video creation, and micro-short dramas have become an important means for short video applications to achieve content differentiation.
The white paper shows that in 2021, the use time of short video applications accounted for 53.5% of the time of video and audio entertainment applications, an increase of 17% year-on-year, and the use time of online video applications represented by iQiyi and Tencent Video increased by 8%, and the user stickiness was enhanced.
In another social communication application with high penetration, the differentiated social needs of segmented groups continue to be valued, especially the silver-haired and Gen Z groups.
Among them, Gen Z (around 11-25 years old) undoubtedly has more market potential, as social natives, they have been a member of social media since birth. However, in the years when Gen Z has gradually become mainstream, the form of social media has also changed.
According to the white paper, Gen Z has a high level of attention and participation in virtual social networking (avatars, virtual spaces, etc.), with 63% of Gen Z users using related features for more than 1 hour per week.
Domestic and foreign social giants have also captured this key information and launched related functions in a timely manner. Meta continues to upgrade horizonVR social platform, and has launched scenes such as home, party, and office. Tencent upgraded the QQ show to a super QQ show, launched a 3D avatar design and home social function, and cultivated users' immersive virtual social habits.
For the population and categories has been gradually subdivided, the e-commerce model innovation in 2021 is also emerging. Including through the community group purchase model to meet the demand for fresh and daily necessities in the sinking market, through online and offline integration to solve the consumption upgrade needs of fresh products in first- and second-tier cities, through social and content e-commerce to solve the problems of information asymmetry in the fields of mother and baby, low consumer trust and other issues.
According to the white paper, the monthly active year-on-year growth rate of movie ticketing, fresh e-commerce and takeaway applications in 2021 exceeded 10%, 20.1%, 18.3% and 12.1% respectively. In the process of further sinking market penetration of e-commerce, community e-commerce has launched a new round of retail service competition with "pre-sale + self-pickup" as the starting point. Investment institutions have also rushed to the beach layout. In the context of consumption upgrading, investors have long been optimistic about the online retail service, paying attention to the e-commerce life service form of "instant fast delivery + vertical subdivision" such as fresh food, mother and baby, medicine, and flowers.
Find the "new blue ocean" from the market market
The top three application types in terms of user scale growth in 2021 are convenient life (24.8%), smart wearables (21.8%) and car services (15.5%). Among them, the penetration rate of automotive service applications is 25.5%, and the penetration rate of smart wearable applications is 10.3%, which is a potential market with low penetration and high growth under the background of rapid technological development.
In the field of sports and health, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the number of monthly active devices for health and medical applications (including fitness and sports, fitness and weight loss) increased by 6% year-on-year in 21 years. There are two main reasons for such achievements, one is the improvement of consumer health awareness; the other is the strong hardware ecology created by China for many years, which provides a good environment for sports and fitness applications.
According to the data of the white paper, with the penetration and upgrading of sports and fitness smart devices, based on richer health data, developers can provide users with better sports health service solutions, including more targeted sports teaching content, healthy diet planning, health care insurance program recommendations and other commercial services, and the proportion of user demand for the above services is more than 50%.
The popularity of smart cars has spawned the vigorous development of new intelligent application scenarios such as travel. In the travel scene, the proportion of user demand for filming beautification, social communication, video and audio entertainment, and game entertainment exceeds 50%, which has become a new blue ocean for the majority of developers to settle in.
Seize the "C position" of technology and continue to apply new scenarios
For developers, the foundation of innovation is technology. As AI, Serverless, low-code, fast application and other technologies are increasingly used in application development, coupled with cross-device application deployment, software and hardware collaborative innovation capabilities into a new stage, technology integration, stimulating the vitality of mobile application innovation, and the continuous open application development ecology, which is a major benefit for developers.
At the HDC conference last October, Huawei released the new HMS Core 6, which opens 69 Kits and more than 20,000 APIs in 7 major areas to developers around the world, including 13 cross-operating system capabilities, to help developers improve development efficiency.
In audio and video entertainment applications, Audio Editor Kit, Video Editor Kit and other Kits can meet the multi-device collaborative development needs of developers in short video, live broadcast, audio and video on demand and other scenarios. According to the survey data, the first place in the user's optimization appeal is that multi-device collaborative audio and video services (such as on-demand sharing, quick connection screen projection and other functions) can be further improved, reaching 66.1%, and such users use 5.8 intelligent electronic devices per capita, higher than the overall level.
At the time of the explosion of the metaverse concept, developers will meta-universe applications, which can provide users with a mobile application experience of augmented reality. For example, in the growing live e-commerce and content e-commerce, the biggest demand of users is to intuitively feel and fully understand the product, requiring the continuous upgrading of product display. The core capabilities such as AR Engine and 3D modeling services launched by HMS Core help developers quickly implement modeling, product demonstration and other functions, strengthen the visual display of products, and gradually upgrade from graphics to live broadcasts to AR "try-on/trial" experiences.
User needs are always changing with the upgrading of technology, with the maturity of AI and other technologies, user needs are also stimulated, such as object recognition, AR display, semantic processing and other new experiences, the proportion of user demand for related functions is 50%-60%. What developers have to do is to optimize and innovate for different user needs.
Expanding overseas markets is promising
In the past two years, with the development of the domestic mobile Internet and the rise of short video products and games, the mobile applications of domestic manufacturers have once again been popular in overseas markets. In 2021, the global application distribution scale of Huawei's application market has reached 432 billion times, an increase of 12% year-on-year, and overseas application distribution has increased by 56% year-on-year. The outstanding performance of overseas application distribution is mainly due to the help of Huawei's application market to expand overseas markets for high-quality applications.
According to the white paper data, in 2021, the download volume of mainland applications abroad in emerging markets has increased significantly, and most of the downloads come from Southeast Asia and South Asia. In 2021, southeast Asian downloads accounted for the highest proportion in the world, at 21.7%. The growth rate of downloads in Africa has been the highest in the past year, with a growth rate of 18.9% in 2021. Although the current source of income for overseas applications is still mainly developed regions, and the income generated by developed regions has been stable at about 84% over the years, the markets in Southeast Asia and South Asia cannot be underestimated.
From the perspective of the categories of mainland applications abroad, the proportion of game downloads has increased, and the proportion of revenue has gradually been released to more application categories, of which the income of social and entertainment applications has been remarkable. Through the Huawei Application Market, developers can grasp the local market situation and growth potential of their categories in a timely manner, and use huawei's rich promotion resources and localization services such as local joint marketing, translation services, and resource incentive plans to overcome the problem of "water and soil dissatisfaction" in the process of going global and achieve commercial success in overseas markets.
summary
Looking back at the development of the mobile Internet market in the past two years and the trend of subdividing the industry, we have reason to believe that the "general trend" of the domestic mobile Internet is still continuing, with the surging innovative technology, the continuous open ecological environment, the interconnected intelligent hardware equipment, and the emerging new consumer groups, which will promote the mobile application industry to be more active.
If you need the full version of the 2022 Mobile Application Trend Insight White Paper, you can download it through the Huawei Developer Alliance Forum.
Leifeng Network