It’s no surprise that people spend their weekends goofing off, relaxing, and entertaining themselves, but our weekly downtime activities also have major implications for mobile application marketing, as it turns out. According to new data from Flurry, a mobile analytics company, consumers are over 30% more likely to download an application over the weekend than during the week.
Not only are people more likely to download apps over the weekend, they’re more likely to pay for applications over the weekend, too. This is perhaps because they’ve tested the free version during the week and then decide to upgrade to the paid version over the weekend when they have more time to play. Or perhaps paid apps are just becoming an alternative to the more expensive forms of weekend entertainment from days past as we continue to suffer through a down economy and tighter household budgets.
In any case, Flurry reports that free games are downloaded 26% more times on a weekend day versus a weekday, while paid games are downloaded almost 50% more times. Other non-game applications show similar trends with 27% increases for free apps and 36% for paid.
Given these findings, Flurry suggests that developers consider timing their launches to take advantage of these apparent trends. For example, app developers could launch their apps early in the week to encourage free-to-paid conversion sales over the weekend.
These numbers came from the latest Flurry Industry Pulse, an ongoing status check report for the mobile industry. This past month’s report is conducted from a sample size of 200 applications, 25 million consumers and four platforms: Apple (iPhone and iPod Touch), Blackberry, JavaME, and Google Android.
