Pakistan ranked 9th in annual app downloads with 3.5 billion downloads

Pakistan recorded 3.5 billion downloads in fiscal year 2022, ranking ninth in the world, up from 12th in 2021 when 2.6 billion were downloaded. As a result, Pakistan is the fastest growing app market with a 35.4% increase in downloads. This is almost three times more than in China (12.9%), which showed the second largest growth.

Pakistanis spent 161.2 billion hours on mobile devices in 2022, up from 134.1 billion hours a year earlier, according to global research agency Insight data.ai. This places the country in sixth place, as it did in 2021. Not surprisingly, China tops the chart with a whopping 1.16 trillion hours, while India follows with 655.6 billion hours.

Global mobile advertising spending rose 14% to $336 billion thanks to short video apps. Growth in app downloads in Pakistan was three times that of China, second on the list, which increased by just over 10 percent. India was third on the growth list.

Data Darbar report states that Pakistan’s mobile device market has experienced strong app growth for the fourth consecutive year, with 3.52 billion downloads, placing the country in 9th place in the world in 2022, three notches higher than last year. year. In the finance category, EasyPaisa and JazzCash were the most downloaded apps, each with about 15 million monthly active users.

Today there are over 70 million social media users in Pakistan (over 31% of the population) with YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram being the most used social platforms. However, from a gender perspective, the gap between men and women in the use of social networks is very large: from 78% to 47%.

Zindigi from JS Bank has also been actively promoting its digital wallet. Meanwhile, digital lending apps have had a somewhat mixed year in 2022 as amid a surge in downloads, they have seen regulatory crackdowns. According to the study, Pakistanis spent 161 billion hours on mobile devices in 2022, ranking sixth in number of hours as they did in 2021. The growth rate of average data consumption slowed down in 2021-2022, increasing by only 11.5 percent. for the last year.

However, average data usage has more than tripled since 2017-2018. Among comparable countries, Pakistan has overtaken the Philippines to take first place in terms of downloads in 2022. Bangladesh also had a good year and made it to the top with around 2.5 billion downloads.

In terms of the number of outstanding active applications from local publishers, Pakistan was second only to Indonesia. However, in terms of traffic and usage, very few locally developed apps have made it to the top Pakistani language charts. Pakistan ranked second in the number of publishers among comparable countries with 4.9 thousand.

This is more than Bangladesh and Egypt combined. However, some publishers, for legal or other reasons, are headquartered elsewhere, which may underestimate the numbers not only for Pakistan but also for other emerging markets.

Meta and ByteDance (TikTok) ranked among the top ten most downloaded apps in Pakistan. The popularity of WhatsApp Messenger has waned in 2021, and WhatsApp for Business has generated a lot of interest. However, CapCut, Bytedance’s video editor, has been the biggest beneficiary.

Meanwhile, Snapchat’s growth is unabated despite never getting much attention from the media and marketing. Among Pakistani developers, telecom products continued to dominate, a common trend not only here but also in other emerging markets such as Indonesia and Bangladesh.

A universal remote control for TV was extra on the list, which shows that the possibilities of the tools are truly global. Its publisher Codematics is a technology company based in Abbottabad and claims the app has over 100 million users.

In the shopping category, Alibaba has made huge strides through continued collaboration with Pakistani companies. This helped it even surpass Daraz in terms of downloads, despite their aggressive customer acquisition through cricket streaming.

The report also states that short format video has skyrocketed globally since Covid, including Pakistan, which is in the top five apps (excluding Tiktok) in this category, recording 36 million downloads in 2021. The number of installs has dropped to 21.6 million, but the category is still topping the chart on Google Play.

Audio streaming continued its growth in 2022, with the top five apps reaching 23.5 million downloads. More than half of those came from Spotify alone as the streaming giant continues to infiltrate the Pakistani market. According to the report, Starmaker also doubled the number of installs appearing on the top charts.

In terms of video streaming, Tamasha doubled its downloads, probably due to cricket streaming, beating Netflix by a narrow margin. ARY ZAP also appeared on the scene as a big player. However, this category still relied heavily on streaming cricket to attract users and is characterized by low retention rates.

The report was prepared by Data Darbar, a private market analysis platform for emerging markets that provides insight into Pakistan’s high-tech economy. A report by Data.ai states that Instagram was the most downloaded app in 2022. This finally ended TikTok’s two-year reign as the video giant dropped to second place in the short format.

In the meantime, Facebook has taken third place, despite all the rumors about its stagnant growth. It also led the way in terms of monthly active users, which is probably the best number for a company of its size. The next three largest apps WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger are also owned by Meta. According to the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), there are 4.9 billion Internet users worldwide, of which 3.2 billion (about 85% of the total) are from lower middle income countries.

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