When users use their mobile phones to check the news, weather, email, or their social networks, they often have a choice between the mobile web version or a specially-created mobile app. But which do they prefer? Mobile apps – at least according to their time spent.

According to first-reported data from Nielsen Smartphone Analytics, a new effort that tracks and analyzes data from on-device meters installed on thousands of iOS and Android smartphones, the average Android consumer in the U.S. spends 56 minutes per day actively interacting with the web and apps on their phone. Of that time, two-thirds is spent on mobile apps while one-third is spent on the mobile web.

Perhaps more surprising, despite the hundreds of thousands of apps available for Android, a very small proportion of apps make up the vast majority of time spent. In fact, the top 10 Android apps account for 43 percent of all the time spent by Android consumers on mobile apps. The top 50 apps account for 61 percent of all time spent. With 250,000+ Android apps available at the time of this writing, that means the remaining 249,950+ apps have to compete for the remaining 39 percent of the pie.

The question now concerns knowing whether it is more efficient to use a mobile application or a mobile web version. This could aid to justify the correlation between the time spent in interaction and the users' preferences.

Another factor of influence can be the own nature of the tasks performed. It is possible that tasks executed in mobile web versions require more time than mobile applications, affecting thus the interaction time.

This content is based on the article “Mobile Apps Beat the Mobile Web Among US Android Smartphone Users”, which was originally published on 17/08/2011. It can be accessed at: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/ mobile-apps-beat-the-mobile-web-among-us-android-smartph

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