Welcome to the apps this week, the weekly TechCrunch series that brings the latest recovery to mobile OS news, mobile apps, and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to have a record 218 billion downloads in 2020 and a global subscription of $143 billion. Last year, subscribers also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using the app on Android devices alone.
And in the United States, app usage has increased before spending time watching live TV. Currently, Americans watch 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spend four hours per day on their mobile devices. Applications are not a way to pass the idle time – they are a big business. In 2019, the combined value of mobile-first companies was $544 billion, 6.5 times more than those without mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $ 73 billion into mobile companies – a figure that is up 27% year-over-year.
This week Google announced that it will need to release new apps using the Android app bundle by August 2021. The company launched the first Android app bundle standard in May 2018 as a push for its modern development, replacing the APA. Since then, the lion’s share of the top 1000 apps and games has switched to ABJ, with companies like Adobe, Dulingo.
Gameloft, Netflix, Ribus, Raini, and Twitter, Today, there are more than 1 million apps using AAB in production. AABS solves some of the problems with APK quality, especially for larger applications and age around games. With AABS, developers don’t have to create an APK that has everything for every type of Android device. They offer a way to quickly and more efficiently download the resources needed for a particular device and use them in a way that focuses on getting the user or player to the app or game content as quickly as possible.
But not everyone agrees that change is for the better. Those who use APH hosting sites such as APKMirror or APKPure to download and share apps think that moving to the AB is a way to force users to use the Play Store instead.
