Mobile customers will download around 25 billion mobile applications by 2015. While apps are becoming popular, people often prefer the mobile Web. In a Adobe's survey of mobile users, the company asked 1,200 U.S. consumers about their behavior with regards to the following categories: consumer products & shopping, financial services, media & entertainment, and travel. Users prefered mobile Web experiences over apps in the products & shopping and media & entertainment categories. 66% said they prefer mobile Web to apps (34%) in these categories. However, for social media, music, "self-contained" experiences like games and maps, consumers chose apps over the Web.
Native data applications, now account for 50% of all mobile data volume according to a new report from Finnish mobile analytics company Zokem. While the mobile Web browser was still the most popular smartphone "app," the use of native apps outside the browser is growing faster than mobile browsing itself. A native app is an application available on a mobile platform such as Apple, RIM, android, etc. The study analyzed over 10,000 smartphone users and 6.5 million smartphone application usage sessions in 16 countries during 2009 and 2010. It appears that smartphone users with a data plan launch their mobile Web browser at least once a month and, on average, spend 300 minutes browsing the Web on their device, a figure which is comparable to mobile voice usage.
While the browser is still the most popular of all smartphone apps with 54% of data application time (time spent interacting with the app) and 50% of data volume, native applications (excluding the browser itself) now capture 46% of data application time and 50% of data volume.
The study also found that Facebook's native application is used by 12% of active smartphone users who engage with the app for 188 minutes, on average, per month. Twitter has a smaller monthly user base (only 4% of active smartphone users) but they average 311 minutes per month on the app. Thus, we can affirm that users of Twitter use much more the mobile web.
A few years ago, smartphone Web browsing accounted for 70-80% of mobile Internet use, but now that number is largely shrinking in terms of relative use. The trend towards increasing use of mobile apps over the Web browser is due to the fact that, in most cases, apps provide the best user experience. For instance, a native YouTube app is faster than the use of mobile web browsing the web site of YouTube.
With many platforms and operating systems available such as: Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian, Palm's webOS, Windows Phone and Java for feature phones, developers will have to decide between "going native" or promote a mobile website instead.
Source: Readwriteweb.com
Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com
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