On December 19th, IT Home reported that the latest data from Appfigures, an application intelligence company, shows that the global application economy will continue to recover in consumer spending in 2024 after experiencing a slowdown in growth in 2022. The total consumption of global mobile applications and games on the Apple App Store and Google Play reached $127 billion, an increase of 15.7% from the previous year. However, this growth is mainly driven by the Apple App Store, while the consumption of Google Play has declined. IT Home has noticed that despite the increase in consumer spending, there are still worrying signs regarding the overall health of the application ecosystem. In 2024, global app downloads decreased by 2.3% year-on-year, to approximately 110 billion times. The data shows that this downward trend is reflected in both app stores. It is worth noting that last year only 5% of apps worldwide provided subscription services, but they contributed 48% of app revenue to two app stores. In addition, the top 10 highest grossing apps globally contributed 13.7% of all consumer spending, an increase of 1.2% from 12.5% in 2023. In 2024, out of a total of 110 billion downloads, iOS downloads were 28.3 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 1.1%. The download volume of Android applications on Google Play decreased by 2.6% to 81.4 billion times. Part of the reason for the decline in downloads is also related to the way Apple and Google manage their app stores in 2024. Especially Google, in the past year, has severely cracked down on junk apps and other low-quality apps, resulting in a significant reduction of 60% in the release of new apps on Google Play. This may be due to increased requirements for developers in application testing and review. The United States has also contributed to the global trend of declining downloads, with iOS downloads dropping by 5.3% to 6.1 billion and Google Play app downloads dropping by 0.7% to 4.4 billion. Overall, the download volume of applications in the United States decreased by 3.4% year-on-year, to approximately 10.6 billion times. According to Appfigures' data, Instagram is the most downloaded app in 2024, with nearly 640 million installations and the most searched app in the United States. Along with Instagram, other top social apps including Snapchat, Facebook, and TikTok have also surpassed X (formerly Twitter) in search volume. Temu is the most downloaded application in the United States with 48 million installations. Apple has recently confirmed that,. Of the total global consumer spending of $127 billion in 2024, $91.6 billion came from the App Store, a year-on-year increase of 24%. Consumer spending on Google Play decreased by 1.5% year-on-year to $35.7 billion worldwide. The United States occupies a large part of this cake, with consumer spending by American users reaching $47.6 billion, a year-on-year increase of 11%. (Among them, the revenue of Apple App Store in the United States was $34.4 billion, a year-on-year increase of 18.4%, while the revenue of Google Play in the United States decreased by 4.7% to $13.2 billion in 2024.) In terms of consumer spending, the world's top ranked app is TikTok, with estimated revenue of $2.5 billion on iOS and Android, excluding the Chinese app store. TikTok is also the top ranked app in the United States, with revenue of nearly 1.3 billion US dollars. Brazil is the market with the fastest growth in consumer spending, with a year-on-year increase of 73%. (New Society)