Things have snowballed this decade for the mobile phone industry and especially for the app developer. It's been a boom of growth, starting in North America, Japan, and Europe and ending in many third world countries like India, South Africa, and Indonesia. The growth from only 55.4 million mobile phones sold in 2010 to 1.39 billion last year, according to IDC, might be the technological statistic of the decade.

But as we grow into our usage of mobile phones, new difficulties are starting to appear. IDC reports that the YoY growth of new phone shipments is dropping to under 2% by 2023. This falling trend began last year, and there isn't any new data to show otherwise. We are finally hitting the peak saturation of mobile phones worldwide.

The question concerning us now is, if we are hitting the saturation of people owning phones, then are we now hitting a saturation of new users? Being able to have a share of the 5 billion global mobile phone users that discover your app and, more importantly, stay on your app is the biggest task for mobile marketers and operators for the next decade.

Future of Mobile Apps

Working in the game industry, we have seen developers today trying to keep relevancy on their gaming apps by the discovery of new ideas like Games as a Service (GaaS) and companies sharing multiple small bite-sized gaming (hypercasual games) to keep players entertained, engaged, and build their brands.

Finding ways to improve engagement and users is crucial when fighting with the over 4.4 million apps on both Google and Apple app stores, also competing for attention. Though many great companies are helping to bring you the users to your app, maintaining customers is still a new and limited art that companies like Tencent have been working on mastering for years.

When Tencent created WeChat, it was seen as a new mobile chat program similar to Whatsapp or their former desktop program QQ. The company was looking to find ways to improve both engagement and monetization that was different than the traditional ads they provided on QQ. WeChat pay was one example, with frictionless payment services that allowed users to pay for everything by just using their phones.

But they finally came to look at another specific metric that was helping to get people to engage more in the app and improve its profitability: Session times. Many app developers see session times as the key metric for how engaged your users are to your app. The amount of time and times they use the app every day can show people are enjoying the app and willing to do more with it. This can lead to more interaction with features that help monetize the app.

WeChat knew that if they could allow people to shop, play, and do other things on the app, they can gain more revenue from these activities. To do this, they would need to add a feature called WeChat mini apps. With the help of Cocos in 2017, together we created an engine that would run small games inside their mini apps section and called it the Cocos Runtime. Cocos Runtime allows the same programmability as HTML5, but with more features like a connection to the user ID, e-payments, and sharing mini game invitations with friends.

Thanks to our help, WeChat in 2019 has over 746 million active mini app users spending over $800 billion RMB in mini apps a year and over 53% of these active users playing one of the over 2,000 mini games available on the app.

Many big companies in China like McDonald's, Air China, and BD.com are all on WeChat mini apps, ready to help you buy a burger, order a trip, buy your next phone, or even play games within the app.

Cocos Play Improves Retention and Revenue

With our expertise in game engine creation, we have helped make WeChat one of the biggest apps in the world. Last year, we wanted to do the same with other companies as well. So we've created Cocos Play, an SDK that can be added to any app and allowed the app to have a library of mini games that can bring improved retention and revenue to an app. It acts just like what you would see with Google Instant Apps if you would need a comparison. Or you can view an example from our YouTube video.

We chose to stay with just games instead of adding multiple mini apps because they are already well known to rank high in the retention of users and revenue compared to other genres of apps as well as their love by all different demographics. Research shows games have a 34% retention rate and own 76% of the total app revenue. We also have excellent relationships with game developers from our years of game engine software.

To help share with you how well we have helped companies, one case study was created and shows how we found session time with Cocos Play has improved an app. We partnered with Tencent News to add the Cocos Play SDK to the app, and we were kindly able to share the data from before and after Cocos Play was on the app. Tencent News is a news app in China that shares local, national, and world news. The app is used by millions in China every day. We added Cocos Play to their app, and we saw a fantastic difference from our research.

Tencent News increased its session times by 100% with the inclusion of Cocos Play. Doubling the amount of time on the site is a considerable improvement and keeps the user in the app to watch ads while playing games on Cocos Play.

What Makes Cocos Play Great?

The key to making Cocos Play work for our app developers isn’t just providing on-the-go games that are fun to play, but adding many other great features as well to help improve the quality and security of our service.

We only work with the best game developers inside our secure system. We know that there are many great HTML5 games on the web. Still, many complaints we found from gamers are the inclusion of inappropriate ads, fears of hacking from the game, and playing games that are broken or uninteresting. Our service only allows games that are downloaded from our server and approved for our customers after testing from our staff. This allows only the best games to come to your app that is fully supported by our company.

We also give you the option to choose which games from our massive library to be added to your app, allowing you to have a more customized look and games that fit your demographic of users. If you don't want simple kids games because your demographic is young adults, they won't be found on your app.

Another great thing is games in Cocos Play load faster than regular HTML5 games and can stay available with limited internet access compared to most HTML5 games that may crash or request you find the internet to continue.

Finally, we are working with the best ad networks around the world that bring high-quality advertisements to your users. You can gain the best monetization found in many of the top gaming apps today with Cocos Play.

Who is Already Working With Cocos?

When we started in January of this year, we only had one or two companies testing the product. But since then, we have been working with developers from all over the world for the past six months. We've found great success with Cocos Play among our partners in all types of apps.

Not only do we provide services for news apps, but we also include manga apps, weather apps, utility apps, and much more.  If you are interested in Cocos Play, we'll be able to find a place for our service on your app.

We'd love to have you be a part of this opportunity and share more on how easy it is to add Cocos Play to your app. Contact us at BD@cocos.com and learn more from our team about what is possible.