New Delhi, Mar 23 (IANS): Indias app usage is growing at 43 per cent year-on-year with music, media and entertainment applications witnessing the biggest increase at 188 per cent, a study by Yahoo-owned research firm Flurry said on Thursday.

Phablet is most preferred mobile device with 61 per cent market share in India. Time-spent in messaging and social apps grew by an impressive 52 per cent across the country and 44 per cent globally.

"As smartphones celebrate their first decade, the mobile app industry has grown into a dog-eat-dog world. We are excited to see what app developers do in the next decade and watch which industry they chose to disrupt, again," said Christopher Klotzbach, Director, Flurry from Yahoo, in a statement.

Personalisation apps saw the biggest usage decrease at -32 per cent. This decrease is due to operating systems integrating the functionality of these apps natively.

In 2016, shopping apps continued to gain popularity, growing 31 per cent globally and 12 per cent in India. Gaming, the app category known as "the darling of the mobile industry," saw time-spent decline by four per cent globally and a small growth in India of just eight per cent, the findings showed.

While business and finance apps grew 176 per cent year-on-year, the utilities and productivity apps grew 99 per cent year-on-year.

The ‘State of the App Nation in India' study is backed by data gleaned from over 940,000 applications, across 2.1 billion global devices from across the world, and the 58,000 apps, across 147 million devices from India, that use Flurry.