According to the App Annie report, with the development of the epidemic, more and more governments and businesses around the world are asking people to keep a social distance. As a result, people stay at home longer than ever before. Such significant changes in people's daily lives have also subverted the mobile field.

In the first quarter of 2020, users spent more than $23.4 billion through app stores, the largest quarter in history.

New apps have also been downloaded more than 31 billion times, an increase of 15% compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, of which game apps account for 40%. Mobile game downloads continued to grow, with an average weekly game download increase of 30% in March 2020 compared to the fourth quarter of 2019.

Game downloads on Google Play reached nearly 10 billion in the first quarter of 2020, up 25 per cent from a year earlier. For iOS, new game downloads reached 3 billion, up 25 per cent from a year earlier.In terms of game applications as a percentage of total app downloads, Google Play outperformed iOS, accounting for 45 per cent and 35 per cent, respectively.

Compared with the previous quarter, user spending on games increased by 5% in the first quarter of 2020. IOS and Google Play are growing at the same rate.IOS gaming applications account for 65 per cent of total user spending, while Google Play accounts for 85 per cent.

For Google Play, the United States, Japan and South Korea were the main contributors to user spending in the first quarter of 2020. For iOS, China is the largest market for user spending, up 15 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2019. In February 2020, the average number of games downloaded per week by iOS App Store in China increased by as much as 80 per cent compared with 2019.

The spillover effect caused by the increase in downloads promotes the growth of user expenditure. As more and more markets around the world adopt stricter social segregation policies, we expect further growth in both downloads and user spending for mobile games.

-App Annie