Android Users Prefer Apps To Browsing, Nielsen Finds
In its first specific look at the habits of Android-based smartphone users, Nielsen Research found that they are making good use of mobile apps -- spending twice as much time getting data from them than browsing.
Nielsen's Smartphone Analytics, which collects data from on-device meters installed on thousands of Apple iPhones and Android-based phones, found users spend almost an hour a day interacting with the mobile Internet. But 67 percent of that time, users are accessing news articles, sports scores, or updating their Facebook status through applications from Google's Android Market, while just 33 percent are browsing to a web site.
Apps present web sites in a format intended for smartphone screens, which range from 3.5 to 4.5 inches.
The study did not look at Android tablet users.
Not Just Any Apps
In what Nielsen called surprising news, Android users seem to be choosy about their apps. Despite the many available for Android, a small percentage are getting all the love from Android fans, with the market's top 10 apps gobbling up 43 percent of online time, and the top 50 accounting for 61 percent.
"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," wrote Don Kellogg, Nielsen's director of telecom research and Insights, in his analysis on Nielsen Wire.
The top five paid apps on the Android Market were, in ascending order, Swiftkey X, PowerAmp Full Version, Fruit Ninja, Beatiful Widgets, and Cut the Rope. The top five free apps were Pandora, Facebook, Kindle, Google Maps, and YouTube.
"It's hard to say whether this is limited to Android devices," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. "But it's certainly good news for Android and at least some -- the top 50 or so -- of the platform's developers. That said, it also has ramifications for advertisers focused on the mobile web -- potentially increasing the value of ad space attached to popular apps and lessening the value of those which are not."
More Free Apps Than Apple
Android users can be forgiven for being app-happy. Although the Android Market carries about 120,000 fewer smartphone apps than Apple's App Store, the Android Market has more free apps, 134,000 compared to 121,000, according to an April study by Distimo. That study also found that Google is far ahead of Nokia's Ovi Store, Research In Motion's BlackBerry App World, and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.
"If we pull the camera back, we can see this is part of the longer-term shift," said technology consultant Jeff Kagan. "Yesterday we used to surf the web and find sites and follow what they write about. That is similar in model to the newspaper model."
This next shift, he said, is to apps that provide more specific news. "The change in the news-reporting business has been going through a fundamental shift for quite a while. This is another important step. The shift is not over. We are still in the early innings of this new game."
