Mobile analytics company Flurry has combed through data taken from the sessions spent on more than 140,000 mobile applications to look at how much time mobile users are spending with their apps, and which apps they're spending the most time on. Their new study shows that some 49% of all the time spent with mobile apps is spent with games. Moreover, users are spending more time on mobile apps in general than they are on using their PC to browse the Web.
Flurry looked at web usage data from Comscore and Alexa and compared it to their usage data for apps, showing that smartphone and tablet users now spend more than an hour and a half a day on their mobile device, compared to less than an hour and a quarter browsing the web on their PC. Combining that number with the percentages of time spent on various activities, the average user spends over three-quarters of an hour a day gaming on their smartphone or tablet.
Facebook is locked in a battle with Apple and Google over who controls the amount of time people spend in apps. Social networking accounts for the second largest chunk of time spent in mobile apps. Fascebook would like it to be more, but they have to deal with the fact that one of their largest attractions, games, mostly don't work on mobile platforms (since they are primarily in Flash). Facebook is forging ahead with Project Spartan, where apps built for Facebook’s platform can run on top of the Facebook Messenger app, instead of requiring the user to launch the iOS app equivalent.
Gaming is increasingly important on mobile devices, and hopefully the platform providers will put even more effort into making their platforms good homes for games.
