Popular Mobile Apps in The Pandemic Era: A Glimpse at Privacy and Competition

COVID-19 changed work and leisure, including more time spent on mobile apps. While this presents an opportunity for new apps to compete with established apps, it is also challenging for new apps to grow and survive, given potentially heightened privacy concerns and ongoing government efforts to tackle data issues. We present descriptive findings from a large database of mobile apps, and discuss how pandemic-amplified demand reshaped app entry and market competition among popular apps. We find that relative to five of the largest EU economies, the U.S. has seen more breakthrough new apps after the onset of the pandemic.

By Ginger Zhe Jin, Ziqiao Liu & Liad Wagman^[1]

I. INTRODUCTION

According to App Annie (2022), global downloads of mobile apps has reached 230 billion in 2021, and an average user in the top 10 markets spent more than 4 hours and 48 minutes on mobile in 2021, up 30 percent from 2019. Publishers, meanwhile, released 2 million new apps in 2021, 77 percent of which were on Google Play. Consistently, global mobile ad spend reached $295 billion in 2021, a 23 percent increase from 2020.

There is no doubt that social distancing, travel limits, and other pandemic-related policies have contributed to these changes. Even more impressively, these changes happened as consumers’ concerns over privacy potentially grew, with many governments having adopted or in the midst of considering the adoption of new privacy and data regulations. Given the role of mo