Technology Today

People devote third of waking time to mobile apps

According to app tracking firm App Annie, people spend an average of 4.8 hours every day on their phones. Although their analysis included viewing television, the UK regulator Ofcom reported comparable levels of time spent in 2020. According to App Annie's research, applications were downloaded 230 billion times in 2021, with $170 billion (£125 billion) spent.

TikTok was the most downloaded app on the planet, with users spending 90% more time there in 2020 than in 2020. "The large screen is progressively fading as mobile breaks records in practically every area - time spent, downloads, and money," said Theodore Krantz, CEO of App Annie. TikTok is expected to reach 1.5 billion monthly active users by the second part of this year, according to the monitoring firm.

According to App Annie's State of Mobile report, the average time spent on mobile applications was four hours and 48 minutes, up 30% from 2019. India, Turkey, the United States, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, and Canada were among the 10 markets studied. Brazilian, Indonesian, and South Korean users spent more than five hours each day on the app. According to the survey, seven out of every ten minutes was spent on social, picture, and video applications, with TikTok leading the way.

Strong advertising spending

According to the analysis, the mobile ecosystem is in good shape, with two million new applications and games being released in 2021, and the number of apps generating more than $100 million increasing by 20%.

YouTube was the most popular video streaming app in the world, with over a million downloads in more than 60 countries. In several places, Netflix came in second. Mobile gaming also rose in popularity, with $116 billion spent on it. Hyper-casual games like Hair Challenge, in which players must resist getting their hair chopped, and Bridge Race, in which players collect bricks and build staircases, were particularly popular, according to the survey.

Although some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the volume of advertisements in such games, app advertising as a whole is doing exceedingly well, with worldwide spend reaching $295 billion last year. This implies that worries about Apple's privacy crackdown harming mobile advertising are misplaced. iPhone users were given the option to say "no" to having their data gathered by applications in the iOS 14.5 release last year.