As per a report by mobile analytics company Flurry, mobile apps have surpassed the PC and mobile web consumption. The company reached out to data from comScore and Alexa for the web analytics and also used the Flurry Analytics data for mobile apps usage. This included 500 million aggregated, anonymous use sessions per day across more than 85,000 applications.
Flurry states that users spend 9% more time with mobile apps than the internet, which is an average of 81 minutes for mobile apps compared to 74 minutes for mobile, Facebook and open web browsing. With the popularity of platforms like iOS, BlackBerry, Windows, Android and J2ME, mobile apps have apparently seen a 91% usage growth in less than three years
In what appears to be an attempt to gain the market share in consumption, Facebook recently revealed Project Spartan which could run apps within its service and probably also compete with Apple and Google in the mobile apps usage race.
Flurry also studied additional categories that users spent time on from May 2011 across more than 85,000 apps. Games and social networking were found to occupy a major part of users’ time. Games marked 47% of the total time with social networking taking 32% on all the categories, making them the most engaging ones.
Facebook’s Project Spartan sure seems to be a well planned strategy emphasizing on both the core categories that interest consumers. Only time will tell however who gains an upper hand in the race to acquire a major part of the market share.