“Every whisper of every waking hour…” chimes R.E.M’s popular song and it could very well be written about our small screen obsession nowadays. Research firm App Annie has run the numbers, and concluded that we spend an average of 4.8 hours a day staring at the apps on our phones.
Depending on how much sleep you are able to steal in a 24-hour period, that’s about a third of your waking hours occupied by the tiniest display in your possession, reports the BBC.
Apparently, Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Digital Wellbeing initiatives in the newer versions of iOS or Android aren’t helping as much as their creators intended, since they first have to be used en masse to make any meaningful impact, rather than sit pretty in a presentation.
According to “The State of Mobile in 2022: How to Succeed in a Mobile-First World As Consumers Spend 3.8 Trillion Hours on Mobile Devices” report by App Annie, the average of four hours and 48 minutes that we spend daily in apps is 30% more than the time we spent in 2019.
Despite the Digital Wellbeing campaigns we are even more addicted to phones, not less, and the key takeaways from the study indicate that the ascent of mobile wallets and phones authenticating everything about out existence now, may be a culprit for the increase:
- More time than ever before is spent in mobile apps, reaching 4.8 hours per day in the top mobile-first markets.
- Consumers are migrating their attention and wallets to mobile as over $320,000 flowed through the app stores every minute of 2021, an increase of nearly 20% from previous records in 2020.
- Mobile services from both early adopters and mobile-forced players remain in high demand — with global consumers downloading over 435,000 apps per minute.
- Advertisers are taking note of the broad reach and deep engagement of mobile apps with mobile ad spend on track to hit $350 billion in 2022, after surpassing $295 in 2021.
