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Americans continue to hunger for mobile phone apps, according to the latest edition of The Nielsen Company’s Apps Playbook, a new white paper on mobile apps to be officially unveiled at AppNation in San Francisco on Monday.
Data and insight outfit, Nielson says the average number of apps that smartphone app downloaders have on their phones is now 27, up from 22 in December 2009. For the survey, Nielson polled over 4,000 mobile subscribers who reported having downloaded a mobile app in the past 30 days.
The report breaks down the results by what it determines to be “the three major operating systems” (Apple’s iOS, Android and Blackberry), although Nokia might have something to say about Symbian being left out of the running.
Owners of iPhones have the most apps, say Nielson’s number crunchers, with an average of 40 on their phones, up from 37 last December, while Android owners report having 25 apps on their phones (up from 22 last December) and BlackBerry owners report having 14 (up from 10).
Games continue to be the most popular app category by far, with 61% of smartphone owners and 52% of feature phone owners reporting using a games app in the past 30 days. Weather apps are the next most popular category.
All categories of applications are more popular on smartphones than on feature phones, but the difference is more pronounced in categories such as Maps/Navigation, where more computing power, larger screens and touch interfaces deliver a more satisfying experience, says the Nielson report.
When it comes to social networking, Facebook is the most popular individual app on all of the major operating systems whilst Twitter is among the top five only on the BlackBerry, perhaps because the device’s physical keyboard is optimized for typing, posits Nielson.
Also, while YouTube is popular on Android and Windows Mobile, it doesn’t make the top five on either the iPhone or BlackBerry operating systems.
The report predicts that the ongoing growth in popularity of connected devices such as touchscreen tablets, eReaders and media players means mobile apps may well flourish beyond phones too, with games being the most popular app category on all connected devices.
We’ll bring you more from the report as it is unveiled on Monday afternoon.
