Way before smartphones became popular, users spent most of their time using applications on their computers, with some web browsing on the side. Despite the growth of the Web over the last few years, it turns out that the habits of users are still much the same: choosing locally installed apps over websites. This is even true on smartphones, according to a study performed by an American market research company. More details can be found after the jump.
Market analytics company which provides metrics for developers on how their iPhone and Android apps are used. Using the vast amount of data at its fingertips, the company has put together a few infographics that reveals much of users’ smartphone usage in this day and age.
In a blog post, Flurry noted that the first interesting statistic is the fact that 80% of the time users spend using the smartphones is on locally installed apps, while just 20% is browsing the Web. At the same time, Safari holds the highest overall phone market share, at 60%, while the built-in Android browser and Opera Mini hold the second and third place, respectively. According to the study, while the average smartphone user spends 2 hours and 38 minutes per day with the device, only 31 minutes are spent browsing the Web using traditional mobile browsers:
“Today, the U.S. consumer spends an average of 2 hours and 38 minutes per day on smartphones and tablets. 80% of that time (2 hours and 7 minutes) is spent inside apps and 20% (31 minutes) is spent on the mobile web.”
Indeed, app usage seems to have in fact intensified over the last few years. As the same study has evidenced, the number of average app launches over the last two years, on both Android and iOS devices, has kept rising slightly, from 7.2 apps in Q4 2010 to 7.9 in the same quarter of last year. This is not a substantial increase, yet it suggests that users are not migrating from local apps to optimized websites.
Another interesting highlight is how much time users spend on Facebook: according to this statistic, it is nearly 30 minutes per day:
“The 30 minutes a day is a worldwide average which means a large group spends even more time on Facebook (possibly hours) watching and participating in what has become the ultimate reality show in which the actors are you and your friends.”
We will be left to see whether better mobile sites will drive users to the Web in the future, although where it currently stands, users seem to prefer mobile apps.
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