Facebook products made up 60% of all app downloads last month

Facebook and other companies it owns were downloaded more times in May than

[NickMNS]

CBC news is quoting a report from Japanese investment bank Nomura
[cbc.ca...]

These stats seems spurious, 142M app downloads a month would suggest that Facebook is doubling its user base annually. Not likely. (2014 to 2015 user base growth was 13%)

Facebook pushes app updates to all their users on a monthly basis, whether the user decides to update is up to the user, but they most likely do. If 1.5 billion users update their existing Facebook app once a year the reported number begins to make sense.

Do the numbers include updates and upgrades? Are these all new users?

In my view Facebook's leadership is not undeniable.

More troubling, is the trend that users are using fewer apps, and even fewer new apps.

It would be interesting to find out of the 237M apps downloaded in May (142/0.60 = 237). How many were for new users that are downloading apps for the first time.

[engine]

I do suspect a lot of that is refreshing and updating apps, rather than new downloads.
It's telling that in the report it indicated that a "typical U.S. smartphone owner downloaded zero apps last month." I would say that i downloaded zero new apps, but I did update some apps I user regularly. I'm constantly being nagged to update certain apps frequently, and i'm slowly culling those that are just too intrusive, memory/battery power hungry, or want too much access to data. Any i've not used in a month get canned.