Whoever invented the backhanded curse “may you live in interesting times” must have seen the year 2020 coming. As I write this on June 1, protests over the terrible death of George Floyd in the United States have been raging for a week and questions of equity and justice, and Rodney King’s “can’t we all just get along” are on the front burner. All the while, global health is still very much an issue.
As we’ve been doing here for months now, I want to trace and track what coronavirus has been doing to both global and local communities.
What we’ve seen so far:
- App use is changing
- Digital marketing spend is changing
- App installs — especially organic — are up
- Change is accelerating
- Lockdown is bad for retention
As we’ve looked at the hard data, we’ve gotten advice from 250 CMOs and marketing leaders on what to do now, and we’ve looked at 7 massive reasons why, especially now, you need to monitor marketing ROI maniacally.
So now I want to take a larger view. I want to look at 2020 in apps and mobile and see what the big trends over the last five months reveal, using a data sample size of about 2.5 billion app installs. And then we’ll do something new: we’re going to pull out our crystal ball and attempt some predictions for where things will go in the near future.