Mobile Apps Take up More Minutes Than the Desktop/Mobile Web

According to Flurry, in the past year mobile application usage has leapfrogged our usage of the Web on both desktop computers and mobile devices.

An analysis of comScore, Alexa and Flurry data shows that in June 2010, an average of 64 minutes per day were spent with the Web, while 43 minutes per day were spent with mobile apps in the U.S.

In December, 70 minutes per day were spent with the Web, while 66 minutes per day were spent with mobile apps.

In June 2011, 74 minutes per day are spent with the Web, while 81 minutes per day are spent with mobile apps. In other words, the average user spends 9 percent more time using mobile apps than the Internet.

“This stat is even more remarkable if you consider that 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,” Charles Newark-French notes on Flurry’s blog.

Usage of mobile applications has grown 91 percent in the last year, while time on the Internet has grown 16 percent.

Of the 74 minutes spent with the Internet in June, 14 are spent with Facebook, according to Flurry. This is the equivalent of about one in six Internet minutes.

For mobile apps, 47 percent of the time spent is with games, while 32 percent is with social networking. Nine percent is spent with news, 7 percent with entertainment and 5 percent with other categories of content.

Flurry notes that this data sheds some light onto Facebook’s recently leaked Project Spartan, “an effort to run apps within its service on top of the mobile Safari browser, thus disintermediating Apple.”

“As interactive media usage continues to shift from the web to mobile apps, one thing is certain: Facebook, Apple and Google will all expend significant resources to ensure that no one company dominates owning the direct relationship with the consumer.”

According to Nielsen, the average smartphone user consumes 435 MB of data per month as of the first quarter of 2011, up 89 percent from the 230 MB per month back in the first quarter of 2010.

Android and iPhone users consume the most data, while BlackBerry users consume the least.

However, Nielsen notes that the effective cost per MB for smartphones has declined in the past year.

Sources:

http://blog.flurry.com/bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web-in-Their-Rear-view-Mirror

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/average-u-s-smartphone-data-usage-up-89-as-cost-per-mb-goes-down-46/