Facebook's social and messaging apps most popular in Q1

New App Annie report shows Facebook and WhatsApp are the most popular apps in most major markets

The United States, for better or for worse, always likes to be an outlier. We do things our own way. We refuse to use the metric system, for example, despite it making so much more sense than the system we use. Other countries have figured out ways to give everyone healthcare and education. But in the U.S.? Nope.

We even use the Internet differently. 2014 saw a huge amount of movement in the messaging space, and it highlighted just how popular apps like Line and WeChat are around the globe.

According to a new report out from App Annie on Wednesday, messaging apps dominated in almost every market, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and South Korea, in Q1 of this year. In the U.S. social still dominates, though communications is still not far behind.

Still, some combination of both of these two categories still dominate apps in every market.

In South Korea, for example, the Communication and Social categories accounted for around 60% of all Android smartphone app sessions in the first quarter of 2015, while Germany and the United States were not far behind this level.

When it came to time spent in apps, the numbers showed the same thing: in Germany and the United States, the same two categories combined accounted for approximately 60% of time spent in apps on Android smartphones, while in South Korea and Japan that number was 45%.

Alright, so social and communications dominate. We already established that. Here's the scary part: Facebook pretty much has a hold on both categories now that it owns WhatsApp.

One, or both, of these apps appears in the top three apps for both number of sessions, and time spent, in four out of the five markets looked at in this study. In the United Kingdom and Germany, they are number one and number two. The only country to somehow reject Facebook's dominance is Japan, which has chosen to devote its time to Line and Twitter instead.

Gaming

The second part of the report dealt with mobile gaming and, surprise, surprise, Asia spend a lot more time in these apps than other parts of the world.

In Japan, they spent four times more of their time playing games than in the United States. During the first quarter of this year, Japan activated around three times more gaming sessions per month than in the United States, and around seven and a half times more than those in the United Kingdom.

"Beyond the ubiquity of messaging, social networking and other apps for communication, there were some significant differences in app usage habits among the five markets in this study," said App Annie. "One of the key differences between markets in Asia and those in Europe and the United States was the extent of game usage on mobile devices."

Interestingly, despite the fact that they spend less time playing games in other markets, those apps still make up the vast majority of revenue for app stores.

In Japan and South Korea, over 90% of iOS and Google Play app store revenue comes from games, 80% in the United States and 70% of app store revenue in the United Kingdom. 

(Image source: udaipurtimes.com)