Thursday, August 18, 2011

Android Owners Use Apps Twice as Much as Mobile Web

In further evidence that Wired‘s proclamation last year that “The Web is Dead” may be on the mark, a Nielsen study shows that mobile apps trump the mobile web — at least when it comes to the amount of time spent using them.

The study, from Nielsen Smartphone Analytics, found that the average Android user spends 56 minutes per day using his or her device to surf the web and use apps. But the latter takes up two-thirds of that time.


The report also found that most people are only using a handful of apps on a regular basis. The top 10 apps account for 43% of all the time Android users spend on mobile apps. The top 50 apps account for 61% of all time spent. There are a total of about 250,000 Android apps in the market at this time.


Nielsen’s data was based on a panel of 5,000 U.S. users in June. The researcher tracks their usage via software on the devices. Nielsen has a separate panel of iOS users, but hasn’t released any data from that group yet.

Wired based its pronouncement on the observation that consumers were starting to spend more time using apps and predicted that the “center of gravity for interactive media” was moving toward a non-HTML environment. Since then, researcher Flurry found that users spent more time each day — 81 minutes compared to 74 minutes — using mobile apps than surfing the web.

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