The number of monthly active users (“MAU”) of China’s mobile internet market has reached 1 billion as of September 2016 according to QuestMobile, among which Android and iOS exceeded 700 and 280 million respectively.
iPhone continued to increase MAU while Samsung and Xiaomi saw slightly declining MAUs. The MAUs of Huawei, VIVO and OPPO increased rapidly in Sep 2016.
Huawei and iPhone performed well in the first and second tier cities while OPPO and VIVO have advantages in tier-2, 3, and 4 cities.
The number of apps in 1-5 million MAUs group and “over 50 million” group are still on growth in the 12-month period ending in Sep 2016. Apps in other MAU groups all dropped to varying degrees.
Total monthly time spent on Android apps had been growing rapidly from Sep 2015 to Sep 2016 while that on iOS apps had been fluctuating during the same period.
Monthly time spent on WeChat continued to grow in contrast to decreasing time spent on QQ.
The average number of newly installed apps per user per month was 3 in Sep 2016, which was mainly driven by users under the age of 24. T
The top 5 app stores by app downloads in Sep 2016 are App Store, Yingyongbao (Tencent), Baidu Mobile Assistant, 360 Mobile Assistant, and Huawei App Store. Xiaomi App Store only ranks 6th.
Among apps with MAUs of over 5 million, 7 mobile app categories saw over 100% YoY growth in Sep 2016.
