Time Spent With Mobile Apps Increases 35%, Catching up to Time Spent With TV

If you find yourself spending more time with mobile apps and less time with your TV screen, you’re part of a big trend.

According to new numbers from Flurry, time spent with mobile apps is quickly gaining ground on time spent with TV.

In November, Flurry measured more than 1 trillion “events” from more than 250,000 applications created by more than 85,000 developers on its network. “Events are actions completed by consumers inside apps such as completing a game level, making a restaurant reservation or tagging a song,” according to the company.

During the month, Flurry also measured more than 60 billion sessions, which it defines as the start and stop of an application on a mobile smart device.

Digging further into this trend, Flurry took a look at the minutes per day spent with Web browsing, mobile applications and television, using data from its own Flurry Analytics, along with comScore, Alexa and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It found that in December, consumers are spending 127 minutes per day with mobile apps, up 35 percent from 94 minutes per day spent with apps in December last year. Meanwhile, the average time spent with Web browsing dipped 2.4 percent, from 72 minutes in December 2011 to 70 minutes this month.

What about TV, you ask? Well, Flurry uses numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which hasn’t yet released its 2012 numbers. So Flurry assumes that time spent with TV is flat year-over-year, given the maturity of the market. In December 2011, 168 minutes per day were spent watching TV, so this number is also scratched in for December of this year.

For those not totally satisfied with that assumption, let’s look at some other numbers from Nielsen, which recently reported that Americans spent 4:18 (hours:minutes) per day watching live TV in the second quarter, down five minutes from 4:23 in the second quarter of 2011. So Flurry’s assumption of flat year-over-year numbers for time spent with TV might actually be generous to the medium.

Using Flurry’s numbers, time spent per day with mobile apps is 75.6 percent of the time spent with TV. Back in December 2011, time spent with mobile apps was 56.0 of time spent with TV.

According to the report, 43 percent of time spent with iOS and Android apps was with games in November, while 26 percent was with social networking, 10 percent was with entertainment and 10 percent was with utilities.

Nielsen found that 38 percent of smartphone owners and 41 percent of tablet owners use their devices while in front of their TV screen on a daily basis.

Mobile apps are clearly worth marketers’ attention as we head into 2013, whether it’s for driving sales, leads or customer loyalty.

By Jason Hahn