The Year in Mobile, Huawei, and VR
A look at the Mobile world of 2019, the EU's dance with Huawei and the Quest went big over the holiday season
Hi there, long time no see. After last week’s GDC report on the last year in gaming, Sensor Tower released their Q4 report concerning the mobile market in general. Here are some of the highlights..
Stores. While the Play Store continues to lag behind the AppStore in Europe when it comes to gross APPs revenues in 2019, $6B versus $5.2B, gaming is a different story. Games generated two-thirds of the total revenues last year with Google taking $4.2B of those dollars while Apple had to ‘settle’ for $3.3B. It remains to be seen if Android devices will continue to penetrate big-spending countries in Europe over the following years and if this gap will widen once this happens.
Categories. Gaming remains the top category of APPs in the past quarter after it grew 11% YoY to make up for 2.3 billion downloads in the AppStore and a 19% growth and 8.6 billion downloads in the Play Store. Considering the ratio of games compared to any other category in both stores, this isn’t surprising in the slightest.
Publishers. For the first time in the past five years, Google had more downloads between all its APPs than Facebook worldwide during Q4 of 2019. One can suspect the increasing ubiquity of affordable high-speed internet plans is to blame here along with Facebook’s scandal-ridden past two years.
Games. PUBG gained a place in the worldwide downloads race this year to be best in show after 285 million downloads followed closely by Garena Free Fire. In terms of new products, eight of the top downloaded games of last year were in the hypercasual category, interrupted from a perfect ten by just Call of Duty and Mario Kart. Through the release of their Call of Duty title that reached almost 200 million downloads, Activision Blizzard managed to overtake Amazon in the number of downloads during Q4 by two whole places. Fortnite is noticeably absent from the report as Epic have famously pulled their game from Google’s PlayStore and actual downloads cannot be estimated.
Big Winners. With the launch of Disney+ gathering 10 million users within the first day, the mobile APP ruled supreme in the USA over the fourth quarter with 30 million downloads. 2019 was, without a doubt, the year of TikTok which finished the year in second place when it came to worldwide downloads behind WhatsApp, with almost half of the new downloads coming from India. If you thought a new social media APP couldn’t break through in 2019, you were clearly mistaken; if you have the same conviction for 2020, I’d reconsider that angle.
There was a lot of chatter in the news in the past week about the relationships between different European states and the Chinese company Huawei. The UK decided to exercise some of that newly-acquired freedom that came with leaving the EU last week and decided to allow Huawei to build at least some parts of their 5G infrastructure that don’t include ‘safety-critical networks’, amounting for about 35% of the total deployment in the future. A day later, the EU group put out a set of instructions with the objective of leaving out Huawei and pushing for domestic development of 5G hardware, a move that can be seen as a soft ban in a similar vein to the actions of the UK. France, The Netherlands and Germany already have similar laws in place at the national level.
‘Why are we making such a big fuss over 5G while there was no such debate over 3G or 4G?’ I hear you not asking.. Well, the status quo at the time when 4G was rolling out meant that its main purpose would be to enable consumer-grade applications, with video being the killer app, with the threat of ubiquitous tracking of our data not yet obvious. Today it’s become apparent that tracking our everyday lives is possible even from efforts of privately-owned companies considering the number of personal devices and sensors we wear on our person at all times, a reality that will only get worse as more devices to be used in the home and the workspace make their way into our lives in the coming years. In a secondary plane, countries are more circumspect when implementing 5G infrastructure due to the amount of consolidation seen in the market in recent years. Huawei was a much smaller player when 4G was rolling out and was only able to scale at the pace they did due to cheap loans from the Bank of China and hefty support from the Chinese government.
Whether these decisions came after seeing some sort of a smoking gun or not is of no importance. Allowing a company from a country that has authoritarian control over all businesses contained within to control the flow of data between the citizens of your country is foolish, to say the least; allowing them to create a secure network is outright irresponsible. Seeing the pace of tech innovation going on right now, these legal limitations will be made obsolete by a combination of hardware and AI in less than a year.
Despite Facebook’s 57% increase in share value during 2019 and decent performance in Q4, it’s easy to tell the market expected better results when shareholders started selling the stock immediately after the call, making for a 10% drop over two days. This, of course, is because current stock prices include an assessment of future performance from the company, simultaneously a bug and a feature of all open markets that deserve their own article.
More interesting were their comments on the future of computers and while the company said they’ve been “focusing on delivering the next computing platform with augmented and virtual reality“, they also admitted that “full augmented reality is still a number of years away“. Here comes cannon content of the call:
[…]we hit a real milestone for virtual reality with Quest. On Christmas Day, people bought almost $5 million worth of content in the Oculus store. And that's an outlier day, but still, this is real volume by any measure.
The fact that these sales came on the biggest day of the year is as true as the fact that customers would have to buy a headset first in order to make them. Pair this with the fact that the Quest has a waiting list of one and a half months —when’s the last time you heard a tech product at this price point was not in stock?— and Facebook’s strategy ahead becomes more clear. The obvious path forward is for Facebook to leverage their knowledge in the social media arena and transport it into VR by starting with communities formed around gaming and then expanding to non-gaming communities and later porting that experience to AR devices once they’re ready for prime time.
The top 10 gamers made in excess of $120M last year and PewDiePie is still second
Last week UPS announced it would buy 10,000 EVs in order to deliver packages and test out some of Waymo’s self-driving tech at the same time. A good PR move before announcing earnings but considering the amount of pollution these vehicles add to a city’s daily does, this solutions will have a substantial impact
If you’re a fellow writer, the info below might provide some valuable insight:
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