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I agree, it's not a great analysis, although top apps aren't a horrible proxy either, there's a lot of arguments missing from the article. I do think it's somewhat likely though that top apps show similar trends as the rest of the apps. Saturation plays a role, but it's probably limited. Many of the top apps like say Facebook were likely to be on a very high percentage of smartphones 5 years ago, as they are today. Yet they used to grow faster than they do today, which indicates that there was significant growth in the number of actual smartphone users driving the growth of app installations. In short, not just market share but market size, too, and that latter factor affects apps regardless of popularity. That raw smartphone user growth has dropped off significantly. Let's not forget that smartphone sales have been linear for a while, not exponential, and in some cases (see Apple's latest results) even shrinking. And that's sales, which includes replacement units. If you actually look at new active smartphone users, by very definition that growth factor lies below sales growth. In rich economies (those where the ARPU is an order of magnitude greater than low-income regions where you're still seeing substantial new smartphone user growth, driving much of the app economy), the growth of new users is way down. Between 2010 and 2015 the US saw smartphone users triple, it's forecasted to only grow by a quarter from then on to 2019. And that plays a role for any app regardless of popularity. What I do think is crucially missing from this article is that if you talk about the app economy, you can't just talk about user growth. The app economy is users * ARPU. That latter part is completely ignored, despite signals (particularly among the top apps they're analysing) that ARPU has grown quite substantially. For example, Facebook grew its worldwide ARPU by roughly 30% in the year ending on Q4 2015, about 6 months ago. In the US it grew 50%. So even the raw smartphone growth figure I referenced to grow by about 25% in the US between 2015 and 2019, is blown out the water by a single year of FB revenue per user growth. Here however I think there is a big difference between top and 'other' apps. Without any data, I'd guess that ARPU may actually be down for non-top apps, due to a flood of competitor's driving prices to zero, whereas top apps tend to get better at monetising their user base. I wouldn't be surprised if the app economy is more lopsided in terms of revenues than it was a few years ago. App boom is definitely over, but not nearly as 'over' as user growth slowdown would suggest. |