Addicted to your apps? You are not alone, as a new report reveals that Americans are spending more than half of their time online on their smartphone apps.
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Smartphone apps command 50% of digital media time spent for internet users, according to comScore’s Media Metrix Multi-Platform and Mobile Metrix.
The more recent comScore report, though, will come as no surprise who have been tracking the rise of smartphone usage. If you’re reading this, the answer is yes, and chances are you’re reading it through an app. Chances are, you have constant and immediate access to your smartphone; and since smartphone screens continue to get larger and network speeds continue to improve, sitting down at a computer for the objective of reading the news or talking with friends is becoming equally less and less necessary.
According to media analytics company comScore, as of July and for the first time ever, smartphone apps take up more than 50 percent of the time of online users in the United States. With larger screens and faster mobile internet speeds due to improving 4G LTE networks, users have found more reasons to instead use smartphones over other devices such as tablets and computers. And some of these chatbots-like those built into Facebook Messenger-still force people to use an app anyway, while will likely secure the aforementioned app’s position on the top-ten most-used apps list for some time.
Whether someone is checking their email, looking up a sports score, or going on social media, they’re probably doing it on a smartphone app.
A recent comScore analysis notes that the Facebook app commands 150 million unique visitors across smartphones and tablets as of July 2016-the most-used mobile app in the U.S. As Quartz notes, these super-popular apps (like Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and YouTube) account for a large chunk of people’s total smartphone time: more than three-fourths, according to comScore research from past year.
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That said, desktop and tablets will maintain “critical roles” in consumers’ online consumption for the foreseeable future.
