• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 2, 2014

The opening of 2014 may prove to be a sobering milestone for the still-new economy of apps. We may have just seen it peak. According to Flurry, this past Christmas and December saw the unsurprising spike in app downloads as new devices fired up and got their initial feeding of content. In fact, downloads set yet another annual record. What was different this year, however, was the velocity of growth in the U.S. market. It slowed noticeably.

Mary Ellen Gordon posts at the Flurry site this week metrics coming off of 400,000 apps the company is tracking here and abroad. Christmas downloads were up 91% over the average for the previous 21 days. The holiday increase was not as dramatic this year as in past years, and year-over-year growth has ebbed. For instance, Christmas was up 11% in 2013 compared to the same day in 2012. But 2012’s Dec. 25 spike was up 90% over the year before that. The increase in overall December downloads in 2012 was 97% compared to just 25% in 2013.

App growth in the U.S. especially is leveling. This maturation is to be expected. Smartphone penetration is slowing its pace, as is adoption of tablets. As people acquire their second or third generations of smarter devices, they are porting old app habits to new units rather than discovering the app ecosystem for the first time. That flush of the new is now occurring in emerging markets where rates of growth still accelerate. Gordon notes that the markets seeing such growth are also less centered on Christmas as the peak moment of device adoption. And so we don’t get the same concentrated discovery period elsewhere as we have seen in the West.

As she points out in her post, the new era of app development can no longer rely on external events to drive a wave of interest that will raise all boats. “The successful developers in 2014 and beyond will be those who put in the hard work of identifying a target group of users, creating apps that work well for them, and continually refining and reinventing mobile experiences to profitably retain those users.”

This new stage also raises questions about the changing model for app discovery and perhaps the diminishing returns of marketing investment in app store placements and social media installation drivers. The devices are no longer new shiny toys -- sites for engaging the new and surprising. For brands exploring the app space, the age of the dazzling tchotchke app may be over, if it hadn’t ended a while ago anyway. The emphasis now may shift to sponsoring engaging experiences within the context of other processes and apps.