Recent reports about smartphone sales—or rather, “units shipped”—point toward a declining smartphone market. The consumer side, however, paints a completely different, far more positive picture. Newzoo’s solution for tracking smartphone usage shows that in just 12 months, 270 million more smartphones were actively used across the globe, bringing the worldwide total to more than 3.6 billion smartphones as of July 2019—that’s a year-on-year growth of 8%.

There is a clear reason for the disparity between shipping and usage numbers: the longer product lifecycles of individual smartphone models. Advancements between models—flagship and budget alike—are currently incremental, as consumers await the next big innovation in smartphone and communication technology.

Estimated shipment and sales data is the traditional measure for smartphone market share, which makes sense when the use case is to track smartphone manufacturers’ financial performance and share value. But for companies who engage directly with mobile consumers—software developers, game publishers, and the like—usage data is what matters. After all, consumers are upgrading their phones less frequently, making shipment and usage data drift even further apart. Data on units shipped is becoming less applicable to sizing total addressable market, as well as to localizing apps that cater to the most prominent device specs.

The average device specifications in growth countries such as India, Indonesia, and Brazil differ wildly from those in more mature markets like the U.S. and China. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all approach to app development is impossible. For this reason, the past year has seen several companies launching lower-spec ‘’Lite’’ versions of their games and apps.

Examples include PUBG MOBILE LITE, Uber Lite, and Booking.com Lite. Meanwhile, social-and-communication apps like Facebook and Skype have operated Lite apps for years. While it seems that results so far have been mixed, paying mobile users in these countries are on the rise, meaning capitalizing on these markets—and keeping an eye on their most used devices—is increasingly vital for the future growth of many companies.

To shine the spotlight on the value of usage data, we will analyze key mobile apps in the battle royale genre, which has quickly flourished into one of the most popular gaming segments worldwide. Battle royale games are relatively demanding when it comes to bandwidth-related costs and mobile device requirements. But that doesn’t mean these apps can’t address growth markets.

In this article, we especially shine the spotlight on one of the genre’s key players, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) MOBILE, whose strategy of launching a Lite version opened up the game’s total addressable market on Android.

PUBG Can Be Played on 750 Million More Android Smartphones than Fortnite

Following a year of beta testing, PUBG MOBILE LITE opened the floodgates in August 2019, having launched in key growth markets across Southeast Asia, MEA, and Latin America. Since the free-to-play app’s Android release, users have downloaded PUBG MOBILE LITE over 60 million times with India and Brazil accounting for the highest share of downloads—54% and 14%, respectively. Brazil contributed the most to PUBG MOBILE LITE’s revenues.

The specs required to run the Lite version on Android OS are far lower than the original PUBG MOBILE’s requirements. For example, the overall install size of the Lite version is less than 600MB, compared to the standard version, which takes up ~2GB of storage space. According to the game’s requirements found online, PUBG MOBILE also requires a minimum of 2GB of RAM; although, we also found that 1.5GB works. The minimum RAM requirement for PUBG MOBILE LITE is even lower at 1GB.

Other battle royale publishers on mobile have taken a different approach. Epic Games’ Fortnite seems to focus predominantly on the mature Western markets. On iOS, it requires iOS11 and an iPhone 6 or beyond. Looking at the U.S. and other Western markets, this means that the vast majority of iPhone and iPad users can play the game on their device. This is illustrated by the top markets in terms of downloads: the U.S., U.K., and France. Fortnite has similar high requirements for Android, requiring at least 3GB of RAM and version 8.1 of the Android operating system.

What does this difference in requirements mean for these games’ total addressable markets? Our Global Smartphone and Tablet Tracker shows that almost 750 million more Android smartphones spread across the globe can effectively run PUBG MOBILE, compared to Fortnite. The image below features a full breakdown of the specs and addressable market for these key battle royale games on mobile.

As shown above, 98.0% of the world’s active Android devices can run PUBG MOBILE LITE, 85.9% can run standard PUBG, and just 59.3% can run Fortnite. Fortnite’s operating system requirement is a more limiting factor than the 3GB RAM requirement. The game is clearly targeting mature (Western) markets. These countries are also known for their higher shares of mobile game payers. Although, as PUBG MOBILE (LITE)’s top markets continue to grow, their share of paying mobile gamers will also increase, as shown in our Global Mobile Market Report. Publishers currently have an opening to expand their influence in these high-potential growth markets, but the circle is shrinking.

If publishers invest in catering to these growing markets’ audiences now, building brand affinity along the way, they can reap the benefits of their paying mobile gamers in the years to come. Whether or not Epic will release a Lite version of Fortnite remains uncertain—as does the rollout strategy for the mobile version of Apex Legends, which EA announced earlier this year.

Call of Duty Mobile, which includes a battle royale mode, is launching worldwide on October 1. As shown in its marketing, the developers are aiming to ‘’optimize the game for high-end phones and to make it broadly accessible for many other devices,’’ making the title a direct competitor to PUBG Mobile.

The Southeast Asia Example: Developing Games for the Fragmented Android Ecosystem Requires Compromise

Every mobile developer knows that optimizing their app’s performance for maximum coverage is no easy feat. After all, different Android devices have different specs, screen sizes, and resolutions. Developers must put in significant development effort to optimize the user experience across their total addressable market, and it is simply impossible to cater to every individual smartphone model within the fragmented Android ecosystem.

Pinpointing and understanding which models hold the biggest share of consumers is vital here. Aggravating things further, the most popular devices for any set of requirements differ for every country/market. The best, most streamlined way to make an informed decision about which devices to develop for? Detailed usage data per country, phone brand, model, operating system, and tech specs.

To exemplify, we will use our solution for smartphone usage to zoom in on the Southeast Asia (SEA) region, encompassing Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. Android is clearly the leading operating system across SEA, accounting for the vast majority (80.2%) of its actively used smartphones. The top Android smartphone brands in Southeast Asia are Samsung, Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo, Huawei. And the specs for these brands’ individual smartphone models vastly differ.

Using the PUBG-and-Fortnite example again, 84.8% of active Android devices in SEA can run standard PUBG MOBILE (a RAM requirement of 2GB), compared to 50.5% of devices for Fortnite (limited by the Android-8.0-and-up requirement and the need for 3GB of RAM). Overall, 76 million more active smartphones can run PUBG MOBILE (compared to Fortnite) across the six countries. PUBG MOBILE LITE adds an extra 30 million smartphones to the total addressable market in the SEA region.

It also is worth pointing out that the adoption of smartphones with at least 3GB of RAM in the region is strongly on the rise, increasing to 142 million active Android smartphones as of July 2019. Just 12 months prior, there were 36 million fewer active Android smartphones in SEA with at least 3GB of RAM—an important consideration for any developer looking to rollout their game in emerging markets, especially if the planned release date is beyond the next year or so.

SEA’s top 10 smartphone models with at least 2GB of RAM represent 22.7% of all actively used smartphones with those specs. Meanwhile, the region’s top 10 smartphones with at least 3GB of RAM account for 19.6%. Oppo’s F9 model tops both the 2GB and the 3GB top 10. Therefore, Oppo’s multiple partnerships with PUBG MOBILE make sense. Despite some devices appearing in both these rankings, the majority of models are different. Identifying which smartphone and brands to partner with locally—for joint marketing or pre-installs—is a common use case for these insights.

Global and Local Smartphone Usage Data’s Variety of Use Cases

Newzoo’s clients that subscribe to its smartphone usage solution include some of the world’s biggest tech giants, as well as leading app publishers that have underlined growth countries as a strategic priority. Others, closer to the telecom sector, ingest the data into their business intelligence (BI) platform, combining it with their shipping or sales data. In the end, this combination of data strengthens companies’ overall mobile market insights and gives them the tools to analyze increasing device lifespans.

The Global Smartphone and Tablet Tracker can be used as an online dashboard or through API access. The data is updated monthly and is derived from genre- and device-agnostic SDK’s used in hundreds of thousands of apps in China and the rest of the world. These apps cover over 2 billion of the 3.6 billion smartphones. Each month, a sample of 400 million is used to extract fresh data into the model and—ultimately—the client dashboard or feed.

If you have any questions or want to request a demo, email questions@newzoo.com.