The results of a research done by the German firm DFKI (“Falling asleep with Angry Birds and Facebook and Kindle”) and presented at the Mobile HCI 2011 unveils which mobile applications are used and when.
The research has been done using AppSensor that is able to record which applications run, the time (start and stop) and the place in which they are used. The library has been installed on 4100 Android phones and the data have been collected in anonymous way.
In 4 months, around 22000 applications have been monitored with around 5 million of recorded sessions.
Some of the main achieved results:
- The average execution time is 71 seconds and the total time of usage of mobile applications is 1 hour per day;
- The "Alarm" application has a peak of executions between 6am and 8am: I would say that this is not a surprise at all!!!
- During the day the communication applications are the most used. The games win in the interval between 6am and 9am and around midnight. During the morning the news applications are the most popular;
- The social network applications seems to be used a lot at the end of the day: for example Facebook is used a lot between 8pm and 11pm with a peak around 10pm. Twitter has a constant usage with peaks around the lunch and dinner time.
