Mobile Use Grows 115% in 2013, Propelled by Messaging Apps
In November 2013, Benedict Evans, a well-respected and widely followed analyst, shared an updated version of his famous slide deck called “Mobile is Eating the World”. This deck quickly made the rounds on social media …
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands on ground Flurry has been staking out since 2011, when it argued mobile app inventory was hungry enough to eat internet display ad spend (mobile app inventory versus display ad spend); the new data converts that ad-market thesis into a usage claim — 115% growth in a single year, with messaging apps doing the pulling.
It also rides a wave already in motion: Benedict Evans refreshed his widely followed 'Mobile is Eating the World' deck in November 2013 and it spread fast across social media, giving analysts and investors a shared frame for numbers like these. Eight outlets — BGR, Forbes, VentureBeat, The Next Web, AppleInsider among them — picked up the story within a day, which signals how much demand there was for hard usage figures to back the deck's narrative.
First-order effects
- Messaging apps emerge as 2013's engagement engine: their developers now own the fastest-growing slice of mobile time, strengthening their hand in any conversation about distribution and monetization.
- Flurry's measurement franchise gains authority — publishers and ad buyers citing a 115% figure are effectively adopting Flurry's taxonomy of what mobile growth means.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers still anchored to desktop display budgets face widening pressure to move spend toward in-app placements, reviving exactly the inventory-versus-spend gap Flury flagged back in 2011.
- Rival analytics and measurement providers must answer Flurry's headline number or cede the definitional high ground on how app usage growth gets counted and quoted.
Third-order effects
- If double-digit-percentage annual usage growth persists, the structural endpoint Evans' deck sketches — mobile as the default computing surface rather than a companion screen — becomes the planning assumption for media, retail, and software businesses rather than a bull case.
- Attention aggregating into messaging platforms points toward a market where a handful of communication apps intermediate discovery itself, displacing the open web and app-store browsing as the front door to services.
The trend: Mobile is consolidating its position as the primary computing surface, with messaging apps replacing browsers and portals as the main gateway to user attention — the trajectory Benedict Evans' 'Mobile is Eating the World' thesis describes.