Total time spent in shopping apps on Android in 2021 reached more than 100 billion hours globally

The acceleration of ecommerce throughout the globe over the course of the pandemic has been hard to ignore, as consumers shopped online often out of necessity, and brands were forced to rapidly change their strategies as a result.

From consumer behaviour to demand prediction to retention, the events since March 2020 have altered or sped up almost every facet of online retail, according to econsultancy.com.

App Annie’s State of Mobile 2021 report has revealed that the total time spent by Android users in shopping apps globally came to more than 100 billion hours in 2021, up from just under 85 billion in 2020.

This means that the amount of time spent in shopping apps globally has more than doubled since 2018, when Android users spent 48.7 billion hours in retail apps.

According to the report, fast fashion apps, social shopping apps, and “mobile-savvy big-box players” saw the strongest movement in 2021. The three regions that saw the most growth in shopping app time on Android were Indonesia (up by 52% year-on-year), Singapore (up 46% YoY) and Brazil (up 45% YoY).

The most-downloaded shopping app worldwide in 2021, according to App Annie’s data, was Indian ecommerce app Meesho, followed by Singaporean Shopee at #2. Chinese ultra-fast fashion giant Shein took the third spot, while Alibaba.com came in fourth. Fifth was AJIO, an Indian fashion and apparel shopping app owned by retail giant Reliance Retail. The download rankings combined data from both Google Play and Apple’s App Store, save for in China, where the data came from the App Store only.