Consumers Spending More Time on Apps than the Web

This is the first year in which smartphones and tablets have outsold computer desktops and notebooks. And, perhaps not surprisingly, it's also the first year in which consumers are spending more time using apps than using the Web.

The average consumer now spends 9% more time using mobile apps than the Internet. In June users spent an average of 81 minutes daily on mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes on the Web, according to analytics firm Flurry.

This compares to 66 minutes on mobile apps and 70 minutes on the Web in December.

While it took years for the Web to worm its way into everyday life, it has taken mobile apps less than three years to attain comparable usage levels.

More sessions

The growth in the last year, Flurry says, has come primarily from more sessions per user per day rather than a large growth in average session lengths.  Time spent on the Internet has grown at a much slower rate, 16% over the last year, with users now spending 74 minutes on the Internet a day.

As a note of interest, Facebook has increasingly taken its share of time spent on the Internet, now making up 14 of the 74 minutes spent per day by consumers, or about one sixth of all Internet minutes. 

Considering Facebook’s recent leak regarding Project Spartan, an effort to run apps within its service on top of the mobile Safari browser, it appears Facebook seeks to counter both Apple and Google’s increasing control over consumers as mobile app usage proliferates.

Flurry also studied which categories most occupy consumers’ time.  For this snapshot, Flurry captured time spent per category from May 2011 across all apps it tracks, now totaling more than 85,000.  The results are shown in the pie chart below.

As the chart shows, games and social networking categories capture the significant majority of consumers’ time.  Consumers spend nearly half their time using games, and a third in social networking apps.  Combined, these two categories control a whopping 79% of consumers’ total app time. 

Further, consumers use these two categories more frequently, and for longer average session lengths, compared to other categories.