With less than a week to go until students begin classes, adjust, a leading app analytics and attribution company, today released a new ”Back to School” report on Apple App Store and Google Play apps for primary school and kindergarten children. Data was sourced from adjust’s apptrace.com database on August 19, 2014.
“As smartphones have become commonplace, the market for apps for children has emerged. Children are increasingly using learning apps to boost their reading skills, math, eye-hand coordination, and more. Tablets and computers are becoming commonplace in schools today, as they are regularly used for teaching. As children become more technically involved, and the lines between computers and phones get further blurred, we expect to see a rise in educational and child-appropriate apps for iOS and Android,” said Christian Henschel, CEO and co-founder of adjust.
The industry already recognizes a strong demand for such youth-centric products. Apple launched a designed ‘Kids’ category* in the App Store that already has 80,203 apps out of a total 1,299,049 apps currently available in the store, indicating that 6.2% of iOS apps are appropriate for young children. More than 72% of children under the age of 8 and 38% of children under age 2 have used a mobile device in the past year, with up to half of them using the devices daily**. These numbers are also high in Germany, where smartphone use by primary school children has reached almost 65%***.
Most children are being exposed to mobile communication devices from birth, as family and friends take photos and show them pictures. Video calling is also becoming popular with young children and remote relatives, now that the data traffic can achieve the speeds necessary for quality video. All of this points to a continued rise in app development for young children.
Interesting stats from the Apple App Store:
- 60% of the apps in the designated App Store Kids category are also in the category ‘Education’; almost half of these (46.5%) are also in the category ‘Games’.
- Kids category has a very high percentage of iPad-specific apps (over 22%), which is more than twice that of the other apps (10.2%)
- Almost all of the apps (more than 98%) are natively in English or have an English translation
- There are 16,855 apps for non-college level math and they are targeted by the developers at boys three times more than at girls
- At the same time, the reviews indicate much more balanced use of math apps by boys and girls: of all reviews that indicate children’s use and specify gender, 45% indicate that the user is a girl
- Apple offers 2,067 apps to help children with their homework compared to Google Play’s 924 homework apps
- The average price for paid App Store Kid category apps is $2.56 USD or 2.30
Google Play kids apps:
Google Play does not have a “Kids” category for young audience applications, nor does it currently offer developers the ability to specify recommended age ranges. Both make Google Play a little difficult to navigate for those seeking apps for children. Using child-related keyword searching (and filtering for pregnancy related apps), apptrace found that 318,674 out of 1,236,698 Google Play apps appear to be child-related, or roughly 25.8%, which is less than the results found using the same search on the Apple App Store (367,968 apps or 28.5% of the App Store). Due to the lack of age-categorization on Google Play, it is hard to determine which of these apps may or may not be child appropriate. Google’s ‘Family Games’ category, announced in March 2014, may provide parents with some guidance on age appropriate games for children.
Most positively rated educational apps for iOS:
Revealed through adjust’s apptrace.com sentiment analysis, the most positively rated Apple App Store Educational category app in the Kids category is “Bugs and Buttons” by Little Bit Studio, LLC (87%). The most addictive Educational category app for children is “Doodle Numbers Quiz” - addictive matches puzzle game like little things forever by by RedSpell (54%)!
“In addition to apps for children to use, parental control apps, and find your child geo-location based apps, we’ve also seen a trend towards primary schools developing apps to keep parents informed about school news, homework and parent’s blogs,” says Christian Henschel, CEO and co-founder of adjust.
"We also see an opportunity for more information and Educational category apps targeted towards children and parents of young children. Marketing is essential for app visibility and as this segment matures over the next year, engagement will become more of an important focus."
Data source:
The data used in this release has been extracted from the adjust “Back to School” report on apps for primary school children and younger. The original data was pulled from adjust’s apptrace database, which can be browsed through adjust’s free online tool apptrace.com that provides insights into rankings, ratings, reviews and more for Apple App Store and Google Play mobile app performance.
adjust’s apptrace sentiment analysis takes over 56,473,400 Apple App Store reviews and 16,536,900 Google Play store reviews and provides a reviewer centered analysis for each app with enough reviews based on how positive or negative the reviews are or if they indicate the app is addictive or crashes frequently.
For more insights and the full report from adjust, visit the media hub at www.adjust.com/media.