Brazil in three charts: Installs, sessions, and retention rates

With an enormous, young population eager to adopt new technologies and a growing smartphone user base, Brazil has a booming mobile app market. Over 78% of consumers in Brazil accessed the internet with their mobile devices in 2022, and total mobile app revenue reached a massive $3 billion. Brazil was also the fourth-largest market for app downloads in 2021. Plus, Brazilians spend a considerable average of 5.4 hours per day in-app. In-line with market trends, Adjust data shows that installs of all apps in Brazil slowed down slightly in 2022. However, they're picking up pace in 2023, with January installs seeing year-over-year growth of 11%. This indicates a significant opportunity for app marketers in Brazil this year. To give mobile marketers insights into how apps are performing in Brazil, we look at the top app verticals with the most downloads, session growth, and best retention rates.

Apptopia data reveals Brazilian app downloads in 2022 by broad verticals. The country was obsessed with mobile games, with more than 5 billion downloads across all platforms. Utility apps came in second with over 900 million downloads, followed by fintech, entertainment, and photography. Interestingly, on iOS, photography apps had the second-highest number of downloads.

Sessions for entertainment apps grew 7% from 2021 to 2022. As more and more young Brazilians get access to smartphones and the internet, the demand for a wide variety of entertainment content, including streaming services and music apps, is also increasing.

Fintech apps also saw massive growth in 2022 as sessions rose 33% YoY. The growth has continued into 2023 as sessions this January were 13% higher than January 2022. Brazilians have quickly adopted fintech apps, with the country’s pro-innovation regulatory landscape allowing digital banks to leverage new technologies that have been crucial for the growth of this sector. Some big names include Nubank (now the world’s largest digital bank), Creditas, PicPay, and C6 Bank.

In Q3 of 2022, we can see that gaming apps performed the best on day 1, with retention rates of 18%. However, by day 7, the retention rate dropped to 5% and by day 30 reached 1%. Day 1 retention for fintech apps was 13%, day 3 sat at 8%, day 14 at 4%, and day 30 at 3%. Utility apps posted 10% on day 1, which declined to 6% on day 3, 4% on day 7, and 2% on day 30. Compared to the other top verticals in Brazil, entertainment apps had low retention rates, with a day 1 rate of 8%, 4% on day 3, 3% on day 7, and 1% on day 30.