While 575 mobile applications with more than one million monthly active users were counted in Africa during the past year, the continent offers good growth prospects for developers who wish to target a young and increasingly connected.  

The number of monthly active users of mobile gaming applications in Africa exceeded 200 million in December 2022, marking an 18% increase compared to January of the same year, according to a report published in early May by Datasparkle, a Chinese firm specializing in digital transformation and data analysis.

Entitled “A year of change: trends in the African mobile market” , this report recalls that monthly active users (Monthly active user/MAU) is a measure used to determine the total number of unique users who have interacted with an application on 30 days, which gives an overview of the performance of this application in terms of user retention.

Regarding the behavior of smartphone game addicts in the mainland, Datasparkle reveals that each user opens game apps on average 113 times and spends more than 12 hours playing each month.  

Mobile consumer, puzzle and arcade games remain the most popular by number of active users in Africa. In contrast, music, casino and card games saw the fastest growth in monthly users, with respective increases of 65%, 42% and 41% in December 2022 compared to January of the same year. .

The report further underlines that the African market for mobile applications is constantly growing. Over the past year, 575 mobile apps with more than one million monthly active users have been counted on the continent, 87 more than in 2021.

In the Top 500 apps with the most active users, there were 183 games, or 36.6% of the total. “Tool” applications come in second place with 8.2%, followed by music & audio applications (6.4%), video players & editors (6.2%), communication (5.6%), social networks (5.2%), finance (4.4%) and productivity (4.4%).

Chinese developers hold the upper hand

In terms of usage time, “pan-entertainment” applications (video players & editors, photography, social networks, comics, books & references, music & audio, newspapers & magazines) are the most popular in Africa. Mainland mobile users spend an average of 3.6 minutes there over 10 minutes of connection.

The geographical distribution of the developers of the Top 100 most used applications in Africa shows that Chinese developers top the list with 38% of the total applications, ahead of the United States (23%) and Europe (11%) .

By category, Chinese developers are more proficient in the areas of games, social networks and video players & editors, while American and European developers are at the forefront in the areas of communication and music & sound.

The report also indicates that Africa is an important growth driver for developers looking to internationalize, thanks in particular to its high proportion of young people in the general population and the constant growth in smartphone penetration. Mobile phones have become an integral part of everyday life for Africans. In 2022, each African with a smartphone spent on average more than 4 hours a day surfing the Internet.

On the continent where the median age is only 19, some segments are already almost saturated such as e-commerce and mobile financial services. In these segments, local players seem to have a clear advantage over international developers. But segments such as games, social networks, sports or even music & audio still offer great prospects for developers. There are also niche markets that have yet to be developed, such as health and fitness, travel, local news, education and food & beverage.

Source: Agence Ecofin