According to a study by a private markets intelligence platform, Darbar dataPakistan became the fastest growing app market in terms of downloads in 2022, with a 35.4 percent increase over the previous year.
Pakistan’s app market grew three times faster than China, which came second with a rise of just over 10%. India ranks third in terms of growth.
According to Data Darbar, Pakistan’s mobile industry experienced major growth in applications for the fourth year in a row, with 3.52 billion downloads, placing the country in ninth place globally by 2022, three steps higher than the previous year.
EasyPaisa And Jazz Cash were the most downloaded applications in the financial category, with approximately 15 million monthly active users each. zindigi, a digital wallet from JS Bank, was also heavily advertised. However, despite a surge in downloads, digital loan requests were stifled by regulations in 2022.
According to the study, Pakistanis spent 161 billion hours mobile in 2022, ranking sixth in terms of hours, the same as in 2021. In 2021-2022, the rate of increase in average data usage fell to 11.5 percent from of the previous period. year. However, average data usage has more than tripled since 2017-2018.
Among comparable countries, Pakistan overtook the Philippines in 2022 as the first in terms of downloads. Bangladesh also had a successful year, making the list with around 2.5 billion downloads.
Mobile app downloads in Pakistan up 35%
Pakistan is second only to Indonesia in the number of open active applications from local publishers. In terms of momentum and usage, only a few locally built apps made it to the top of the app chart in Pakistan. Pakistan has the second highest number of publishers among peer countries, at 4.9K. This figure exceeds that of Bangladesh and Egypt combined. However, several publishers are based abroad for legal or other reasons, which may understate the figures for not only Pakistan but other emerging countries as well.
meta And ByteDance (TikTok) were among the top 10 most downloaded applications in Pakistan. WhatsApp Messenger’s popularity started to decline in 2021, while WhatsApp for Business grew in popularity. CapCut, Bytedance’s video editor, was the biggest winner.
Despite never getting much attention from the media or marketing, From Snapchat growth has been uninterrupted. Telecommunications products continued to dominate among Pakistan-based developers, a trend seen not only in Pakistan but also in other emerging countries such as Indonesia and Bangladesh.
The odd one out on the list was universal tv remote control, showing how the opportunity in tools is truly global. Codematics, a digital startup in Abbottabad, estimates that the app has more than 100 million users.
alibaba has made tremendous strides in the retail segment as a result of its continued involvement with Pakistani companies. It enabled it to overtake Daraz in terms of downloads, despite the significant customer acquisition through cricket streaming.
Short format video has skyrocketed since COVID around the world, including Pakistan, where the top five apps (excluding Tiktok) had 36 million downloads in 2021. Installs dropped to 21.6 million, although the category is position on Google Play’s ‘top-scoring’ table. Audio streaming continued to grow in 2022, with 23.5 million downloads of the top five applications. More than half of them came true Spotify alone, as the streaming giant expands its presence in the Pakistani market. According to the data, Starmaker has doubled its installations to appear on the top rankings.
tamasha increased downloads in video streaming, most likely due to its cricket streaming, surpassing Netflix by a wide margin. ARY ZAP has also emerged as a prominent player on the scene. However, the category has mainly continued to rely on cricket broadcasts to attract viewers and has a low retention rate.
The report was prepared by Darbar data which is a private market intelligence platform for emerging markets that provides insights from Pakistan’s tech-driven economy.
