July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Only 20 percent of American consumers’ time on mobile devices is spent on the web. A massive majority, 80 percent, is spent in apps: games, news, productivity, utility, and social networking apps.

Turns out, it’s an app world, after all.

According to app analytics firm Flurry, which tracks app usage on a staggering 300,000 apps on over a billion active mobile devices, we spend an average of 158 minutes each and every day on our smartphones and tablets. Two hours and seven minutes of that is in an app, and only 31 minutes is in a browser, surfing the old-school web.

A big chunk of that 158 minutes is taken up with games — 32 percent — but it’s almost shocking to see how much time a single app and a single company eats up. Eighteen percent of all the time that Americans spend on their phones is spent in the Facebook app, a figure that by itself dwarfs all other social networking apps.

Combined, the others only take up six percent of our time.

There was a time when developers thought HTML5 would kill the mobile app, with experts like Mike Rowehl saying things like: “We’ll forget that we even passed through another era of native apps on the way to the mobile web.”

In an interesting twist, however, HTML5 is actually being used more as a tool for cross-platform native app development. In fact, it’s now the number one choice for developers building apps for multiple platforms.

Flurry also says that people are now using more apps than ever, launching 7.9 per day in the last part of 2012 versus 7.5 per day in 2011 and 7.2 per day in 2010. Consumers are continuing to try new apps as well, with long-term users adding new apps regularly to their existing stack.

“We believe that with consumers continuing to try so many new apps, the app market is still in early stages and there remains room for innovation as well as breakthrough new applications,” Flurry says.

Is the mobile web dead?

Not necessarily — we’re only five years into this ongoing mobile revolution. But today, people are talking with their taps, and they’re overwhelmingly choosing apps.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After people activated a record-breaking 17.4 million iOS and Android devices on Christmas Day, the following week saw record-smashing activity as well: over 50 million iOS and Android-powered smartphones and tablets activated, and a staggering 1.76 billion apps downloaded.

“The last week of 2012 was the largest week for both new device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history,” Peter Farago of the mobile analytics firm Flurry wrote on the company’s blog today.

The weekly average leading up to the holidays was just slightly over a billion apps downloaded each day, which almost doubled in the last week of the year. The same week in 2011 had previously held the record for number of downloads, but saw much fewer device activations, including only 6.8 million activations on Christmas day.

Most of the downloads were, predictably, in countries that actually celebrate Christmas, with the U.S taking the top spot with 604 million apps downloads in the last week of 2012, the U.K. with 132 million, and Germany, France, and Canada following up in the 50 million range. China, by virtue of its massive population, still held second place in app downloads with 183 million despite the lack of a traditional gift-giving time around Christmas.

Flurry says that billion-download weeks will likely become the norm in 2013, and that a two billion-download week will likely come near the end of the year.

The analytics firm can estimate total device activations and app downloads since its stats solution powers usage data for over 260,000 apps running, it says, on the “vast majority” of iOS and Android phones and tablets. A quarter of all apps downloaded on a daily basis include Flurry analytics, Farago wrote, which allows the company to detect over 90 percent of all new devices activated.

photo credit: valanzola.t via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apparently, people like to have fun, and they buy digital devices to assist them in that noble quest.

This is perhaps not a shock.

But they use those devices differently, according to Flurry, the app analytics company. To understand those differences between how we use our smartphones and smart tablets, Flurry analyzed six billion user sessions from 500 million devices in September.

Tablet owners are a little older than smartphone owners and have fewer Y chromosomes. And they spend a lot more time on games – 67 percent of time spent on a tablet is spent playing a game, versus 39 percent for smartphones.

Of course, this shows some overlap between devices and owners, with many owning both smartphones and tablets. But when Flurry analyzed the demographics of the 30 million people who have granted it the right to collection information on them, they found that, on average, tablet owners tend to be both more female and a little older.

Another key difference?

Tablets are for after dinner — the prime-time entertainment hours. While smartphones are in use all day, and do also show a small increase in the evening hours, tablets spike in the three hours between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m.  That jives with Forrester research that says that 85 percent of tablet owners in the U.S. use them while watching TV as a second screen: following tweets, sharing updates, and chatting about what they are watching.

But it can’t just all be second-screen: That 67 percent of time spent playing games means that there must be a significant theft of time from traditional prime-time entertainment as well.

In addition, Flurry found that while smartphones are used more often than tablets, tablets are used for longer periods of time than smartphones. App engagement — the number of times a person opens an app — was 12.9 times each week on smartphones, versus 9.5 on tablets. But minutes per session showed 8.2 minutes in each tablet app, exactly double the 4.1 minutes in an app on a smartphone.

That rings anecdotally true: You pull out your smartphone to check a message or your calendar and then put it away … while you pull out your tablet on the sofa to catch up on news, read a book, or play a game.

In short, despite work from Apple and others to position them as more than entertainment devices, the biggest use case for tablets is still the sofa, while the smartphone’s home is still your front pocket.

photo credit: Andrew Scott via photopin cc

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