It’s been only three years since their introduction, but the amount of time U.S. users spend each day using native mobile apps now exceeds desktop and mobile Web consumption, according to Flurry’s latest research and analysis. Americans spent 81 minutes per day using mobile apps, a 91% year-over-year increase, according to Flurry, as compared to the average 74 minutes per day they spent consuming information on the Web. Rather than spending more time per session, Flurry found that mobile app users are accessing mobile apps more frequently.
The gap between daily mobile app and daily Web consumption has been narrowing since Flurry’s first analysis in June 2010, when the former amounted to 43 minutes and the latter to 64 minutes. As of December, mobile app usage had increased a full 23 minutes to 66 minutes per day, a surge of more than 53%, while average daily Web usage increased 6 minutes, an 8.6% increase, according to Flurry’s data, which was aggregated from comScore and Alexa, and its own model.
“Our analysis shows that, for the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses desktop and mobile web consumption. 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,” according to the Flurry blog post.
Games and social networking accounted for 79% of mobile app usage as of May, 2011, according to Flurry: games 47% and social networking 32%. News (9%), entertainment (7%), and Other (5%), made up the remainder. “Any way we slice it, Games and Social Networking apps deliver the most engaging experience on mobile today.”
Facebook is garnering a growing amount of consumers’ Internet time: it now accounts for 14 of the 74 minutes they spent each day on the Internet, Flurry’s Charles Newark-French notes, explaining leaked news of Facebook’s Project Spartan, an initiative aimed at running mobile apps within its site on top of Apple’s mobile Safari browser and thereby countering competition from Apple and Google to capture the lion’s share of consumers’ mobile app usage.
