More people are spending more money in apps, and users are spending more of their time on social, even if they're not posting as many updates themselves.

These are some of the findings from data.ai's latest "State of Mobile" report, which looks at how apps across each consumer category performed in 2023 and where the data.ai team predicts they'll be headed over the next year.

The full report, at 103 pages, is available to download here (with email sign-up), but in this post, we take a closer look at some of the key highlights.
The report explores our growing dependency on apps and mobile connectivity, with average time spent on mobile rising to 5 hours per person per day on average in 2023, up 6% on 2022.
And social media apps are a big part of that, too-with total hours spent on social platforms rising as well, though less dramatically than in the past years.
It's interesting for this shift in behaviour and the steady move away from posting our own updates to social apps.

But apart from that, other reports showed that people had updated social feeds less and that engagement activity actually had moved more to DMs. So even though we are spending more time on social, most of that time seems to go to entertainment rather than to what we would conventionally term as "social" activity.

And for the second front, app spend had also risen. Overall consumer spend in apps had surpassed $60 billion in 2023.
Both "Entertainment" and "Social media" increased their spends quite a lot throughout the year, with more platforms developing new means to monetize their respective audience .
According to data.ai:

TikTok is the first app ever - including games - to reach $10 billion in all-time consumer spend. At one point, this seemed impossible, a few years in fact. In fact, it took nearly 10 years for any non-game app to accumulate just $1 billion in all-time consumer spend. TikTok is now passing $1 billion in consumer spend each quarter.

The report states that virtually all of TikTok's in-app purchase revenue is generated through its coins, which can be used to tip creators during live streams.
In an interesting twist, TikTok hasn't yet managed to transfer this behavior over into in-stream shopping-as-yet, but in the light of its overall monetization performance you can see why TikTok wants to expand on that, and get more users spending more money in app.

And if it can, that will be a huge opportunity.

If any app was close to reaching the status of "everything app" in the Western market, it is likely TikTok, which would no doubt ring alarm bells for those concerned about the influence of Chinese apps.

Microsoft's Bing search engine, a mostly ignored Google competitor, saw downloads jump by 1,500%, based on the addition of ChatGPT elements.

The interest shown by the consumers in generative AI is, therefore, quite evident, becoming an indicator of the revolutionizing influence AI has on the discovery process.

There are also brief observations regarding X and how it experienced a decline in usage in the year 2023.
That flies directly in the face of Elon and Co.'s frequent statements that X is actually growing, and doing better than ever. External reporting doesn't show that, though Elon has also changed the very definition of success, by switching to new metrics to measure user engagement.
The data.ai report covers a broad range of app categories and trends, and provides some interesting insights to consider for where things are headed.