In USA, more time is now spent in mobile apps than on Internet

Rating: Shock revelation from Flurry Analytics

A tipping point has been reached in the USA, according to research carried out by Flurry Analytics. The company claims that a typical US citizen now spends 81 minutes per day using mobile apps as compared to 74 minutes surfing the full Internet. It reached this conclusion using its own research into mobile app usage and publicly available data from comScore and Alexa to calculate full Internet usage. This major shift in behaviour was revealed by Flurry’s Charles Newark-French in a blog post here. Newark-French commented, “It took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms.”
As Newark-French revealed, “Our analysis shows that, for the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses desktop and mobile web consumption.”

Flurry Analytics data currently exceeds 500 million aggregated, anonymous use sessions per day across more than 85,000 applications.

The company estimates this accounts for approximately one third of all mobile application activity, which it scaled-up accordingly for this analysis.

For mobile apps, Flurry tracks iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and J2ME. And for the web, our figures include the open web, Facebook and the mobile web.

Newark-French’s observations on Facebook’s role in all of this are fascinating.

The research showed that Facebook has increasingly taken its share of time spent on the Internet, now making up 14 of the 74 minutes spent per day or about one sixth of all Internet minutes.

He believes that Facebook is seeking to counter both Apple and Google’s increasing control over consumers as mobile app usage proliferates.

This opinion is based on a recent leak regarding Facebook’s Project Spartan which is an effort to run apps within its service on top of the mobile Safari browser – thus disintermediating Apple. Sneaky.

source: Flurry Analytics