During a discussing this morning between ourselves and someone else that uses the same office space, we got talking about mobile apps compared to mobile browsers and the market share of each one. We were convinced that apps had the higher percentage, he was convinced that mobile browsers were more prevalent. At the time we couldn’t find an answer so we finished our cups of coffee and got on with some real work for a bit, but it was bugging me throughout the day so I thought I’d dedicate another few minutes to having a look. Aside from just letting you know what we get up to first thing on a Thursday morning (there is a point behind this post) the results we found were surprising, even to us.
We found this infographic which, apart from being the longest infographic we’ve ever seen, shows some really interesting figures. Over 80% of time spent on mobile devices was spent using apps compared to mobile browsers, this 80% is then broken down further into Games – 32%, Facebook – 18%, Entertainment – 8%, Utility – 8%, Social Networking – 6%, News – 2%, Productivity – 2%, Other – 6%. These figures without a doubt show that people are using the apps on their phone more than they are using their mobile browsers.
That’s not where the good news stops though, during our trawl through the mass of information available on the internet (surprisingly large amounts of which relate to figures specifically on Thanksgiving) we found this quite promising statistic from w3schools who have been tracking operating system statistics over the last nine years. The report shows that since the start of 2011, mobile has seen a steady increase in percentage share from 0.7% up to 3.8% at the end of last year.
Put these two figures together and you can see that, not only is mobile becoming more important for businesses but, apps are essential for anyone with a mobile presence. Of course it’s important to have a mobile optimised site as well, just to cover all of your bases, but businesses without an app are soon going to be left behind.