Flurry data: overall app session activity grew 6% in 2017; shopping app usage grew 54%, media, music, entertainment apps grew 43%, lifestyle apps dropped 40%
The app economy is continuing to grow, with the worldwide revenue from app stores expected to top $110 billion this year, according to recent estimates from App Annie.
Context & Ripple Effects
Flurry's 2017 numbers mark a sharp deceleration from its own prior reading: the firm measured 76% app usage growth in 2014, led by lifestyle and shopping at 174%. Three years later, overall session activity is up just 6%, and the same two categories have split — shopping still surging at 54% while lifestyle collapses 40%.
The split matters because it foreshadows how the app economy now grows: not through more usage, but through more money per session. App Annie pegged 2017 store revenue above $110B, and subsequent trackers show the pattern hardening — spending rose 15.7% in 2024 even as downloads fell, and 2025 repeated the divergence with spending up 21.6% against another download decline.
First-order effects
- Shopping and media/music/entertainment developers enter 2018 with rising engagement to monetize, while lifestyle app makers face a shrinking usage base for the second consecutive reading after leading all categories in 2014.
Second-order effects
- With session growth near flat, user acquisition stops being the growth lever — publishers and platforms shift investment toward extracting more revenue per active device, which is exactly the spending-up-downloads-down pattern the later Appfigures reports confirm.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the app market bifurcates structurally: transactional categories (shopping, media) consolidate around high-frequency engagement, while lifestyle/utility apps either find niche monetization or exit — leaving store revenue concentrated in fewer, deeper-used apps.
The trend: The app economy has shifted from usage-led expansion to monetization-depth growth, where rising consumer spending coexists with flat-to-declining sessions and downloads.