Today’s smartphones do so much that smartphone users spend a large portion of their day using them while doing anything from exercising to waiting for food at a restaurant. And because smartphones use touchscreens as their primary method of input, most of these interactions involve touch. So how many times in a day does the average Android smartphone user touch their phone? According to a recent study, 2,617 times. Accounting for sleep, that’s more than twice a minute. The study was conducted in February of 2016 and surveyed 94 Android users. The participants were asked to download and install an app that tracked every time they touched their devices for a period of five days.
The majority of usage sessions consisted of only a single app. Participants used more than four apps in a single session only nine percent of the time. Different types of apps produced different numbers of touches per session, with gaming taking the lead. Smartphone games, such as Pokemon GO, typically have touch controls, so when playing them the user is constantly touching and swiping on the screen. And because games are likely to be used for longer periods of time, this increases the touch interactivity of them as well. Shopping apps ranked near the top in terms of touch interaction. Next were images, which often require zooming and other touch input to get the right view and angle, and then weather apps. As far as app usage, forty-nine percent of users use between six and ten apps a week, while only twenty-one percent use between eleven and twenty apps, which may come as a bit of a surprise since it is not uncommon to have over one hundred apps installed. In a given day, the majority of smartphone users reported using only one to five apps, while only eight percent used between eleven and twenty.
This study highlights some interesting information regarding how much time people typically spend on their smartphones. And perhaps more interesting is the small number of apps that people use on a regular basis, showing that the ones they do use frequently interest them enough to spend quite a bit of time in.