Apps, apps, and more apps – we just cannot get our fill of them. In the old PC days, you had to spend a fortune on a program to load onto your hard drive in order to use it, so we were more discerning of our purchases. We still have to download an App to use on our mobile devices, however, many are free and even a higher end App may only cost a few bucks, so we tend to download a lot more – although studies have shown that many times we use an App once and never use it again. Our mobile devices – be it smartphone, tablet or a new wearable – all have some basic, built-in functions, but to make most use of them, you must download some Apps, or at least one would think so.
U.S. analytics company comScore has published a ‘whitepaper’ report about the App habits of the American population and our love-hate relation with our trusty Apps – some of which startled me and I am sure will surprise you. They polled a large pool of U.S. citizens, aged 18 and older, over a three-month period that ended in June 2014 and the found some interesting statistics: Digital media time has jumped 24-percent in the past year and in no small part because mobile App usage has gone up 52-percent – Total mobile activity, including browsing, recently eclipsed the 60-percent mark leaving PCs at only 40-percent – Apps on mobile devices account for 7 out of every 8 minutes of usage – and that the smartphone App activity is 88-percent versus the tablet at 82-percent.
I think the one single statistic that shocked me the most is that almost 66-percent of smartphone uses have NEVER DOWNLOADED AN APP – thats right, well over half of the smartphone users never use anything but what comes on their device from the factory – I guess they have no idea of the word bloatware. The rest of us more than make up for those that do not participate in the download world as the average smartphone user downloads 3 Apps per month – and even within the downloaders, 7-percent of users account for nearly half of all downloads in a given month. About 57-percent of smartphone users access Apps every day of the month, while 26-percent of tablet owners did so. A whopping 42-percent of all App time occurs with the users’ one most favorite App. The chart below will show you the number of Apps downloaded each month.
It comes as no surprise the type of Apps used the most – the majority of the App usage is with Social Networking, Games and Radio – contributing to nearly half of the time spent using Apps. Android users spend a greater share of our time in the Search, Email, Games, TV and Retail categories – no surprise there as we have Google Search and Gmail readily available. Apple users tend to lean toward consuming media type categories, such as News, Radio, Photos and Social Media.
The top ranking Apps are dominated by the largest brands: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay…those six brands account for 9 out of the 10 most used Apps. Facebook is the number one App in both audience size and time used stretched out across all demographic segments showing the importance of the social media segment. Across all age groups, the most time spent is on the categories of Social Networking, Entertainment and Messaging.
Please hit us up on our Google+ Page and let us know what your top five Apps are…as always, we would love to hear from you.