2023-10-19 15:01:10
According to Data.ai, 18-24 year olds spend less time on social, gaming and communication applications. But love the ones that offer products at low prices.
A few days ago, the annual “Born Social” study by the Heaven agency revealed that French children aged 11-12 were significantly reducing their presence on networks. Today, mobile data analyst Data.ai (formerly App Annie) tells us that 18-24 year olds are restricting their use of mobile applications. Have the youngest grown tired of screens, leaving them poor boomers et millennials that we are scrolling alone? The observation is obviously more complex than that.
But the figures from data.ai are nonetheless striking. In the general population, the use of mobile applications is increasing, reports this agency for analyzing mobile data. But among 18-24 year olds, it fell by 10.3% in one year. They represented 23% of French mobile app users in the 3rd quarter of 2022, compared to 20% in the 3rd quarter of 2023.
The categories of applications on which this age group spends the most time are always the same: “social networks”, “communication”, “videos” and “gaming”. But all these categories recorded a drop in the number of hours spent: -13.3% for networks, -5.5% for messaging (communication), -14.3% for video applications, -14.1% for games.
Screen time control and nostalgia
This drop might be explained by a form of return to normal during the Covid period when we all spent much more time on our screens. It might also be explained by an increasingly visible trend among younger people: the need to control their screen time, to delete certain apps that are too time-consuming. The most radical are abandoning their smartphones for “dumb phones” (flip phones and other Nokia 3310s) to treat themselves to digital and nostalgia, increasing their sales very slightly in the United States.
However, the cure is not complete. Two categories of applications are growing significantly: shopping apps (+10.3%), and travel and mobility (+19.5%).
Passion Shein and Lidl
When it comes to shopping, Gen Z is following a more global trend. Over the past five years, the use of low-cost e-commerce applications such as AliExpress, Shein and Temu has grown significantly around the world. They recorded the most significant increases in terms of time spent on phones, pointed out a recent report from Data.ai. Temu, which offers all kinds of products at very low prices combining e-commerce and gaming, is the fastest growing application in France, Germany and Italy. In France, this passion for this Chinese app is accompanied by a particular appetite for hypermarket apps like those of Leclerc, Lidl, Action or Carrefour, which are all part of the top 10 shopping apps. Their downloads have increased by 450% since 2018.
For the analyst, the success of e-commerce apps is due to their ability to multiply functionalities. Over the years, most of them have added loyalty programs, recommendation systems, mini-games, payments in installments and deferred… These signals show that once once more hyperconsumption has “happy” days ahead of her, even if the time spent on the networks decreases.
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