App Epidemic
The global population has faced some pretty serious epidemics over the last few hundred years, with biggies like Bubonic Plague in the mid 1300’s that took out between 30% and 60% of the European population, or the Spanish Flu of the early 1900’s that took out close to 100m. HIV, still active since the 1980’s has taken over 36m lives, and our own generation’s COVID-19 has killed more than 4.5m and continues to do so across the globe, but we, as a society continue to survive despite these epidemics, yet there are some more subtle and perhaps even more insidious epidemics that afflict the global population at almost every level, and are supported by companies that generate trillions of dollars promoting such plagues, despite a level of addiction that continues to increase each year.
No, we are not talking about opioids, as that is a problem far beyond our area of expertise and scope, but one that afflicts consumers almost every hour of their waking lives and eats into the fabric of our society and lives a bit more each day. Recent statistics on the use of mobile apps reveals that in 12 of the 16 markets shown below consumers spend more than 4 hours/day using mobile applications, and that number has increased from 8 of the 16 above 4 hours/day in just one quarter. Assuming the average individual sleeps 7 hours a day, that comes to a staggering 24.7% of a US citizen’s time spent staring at a smartphone, while in Indonesia that number grows to 32.4%.
Rather than rant about how companies like Facebook (FB), Google (GOOG), and YouTube (GOOG) continue to work toward increasing that time so their user data becomes more valuable to those that want to sell you just about anything, we will let members of Congress embarrass themselves with their public display of their lack of knowledge concerning social media, so the question then becomes, what are we doing while we are staring at our smartphones? We take the data one step further and break down the regions shown in Fig. 1 by the 5 most downloaded apps during the 3rd quarter.
No, we are not talking about opioids, as that is a problem far beyond our area of expertise and scope, but one that afflicts consumers almost every hour of their waking lives and eats into the fabric of our society and lives a bit more each day. Recent statistics on the use of mobile apps reveals that in 12 of the 16 markets shown below consumers spend more than 4 hours/day using mobile applications, and that number has increased from 8 of the 16 above 4 hours/day in just one quarter. Assuming the average individual sleeps 7 hours a day, that comes to a staggering 24.7% of a US citizen’s time spent staring at a smartphone, while in Indonesia that number grows to 32.4%.
Rather than rant about how companies like Facebook (FB), Google (GOOG), and YouTube (GOOG) continue to work toward increasing that time so their user data becomes more valuable to those that want to sell you just about anything, we will let members of Congress embarrass themselves with their public display of their lack of knowledge concerning social media, so the question then becomes, what are we doing while we are staring at our smartphones? We take the data one step further and break down the regions shown in Fig. 1 by the 5 most downloaded apps during the 3rd quarter.
Average Daily Hours Spent in Apps - 3Q 2021 - Source: App Annie
The obvious winner on a global scale is TikTok (pvt), which showed up in the top 5 in many of the major regions shown below. Instagram (FB) was ranked second, followed by Facebook on a worldwide basis based on downloads, however in terms of spending, while TikTok still maintained the top position in 3Q, YouTube and Tinder (MTCH) were 2nd and 3rd. Facebook continued to hold the number one position in active users, followed by WhatsApp Messenger(FB) and Instagram.
We break out the top 10 worldwide as to spending in the table below:
It is hard to imagine that we spend so much time on our phones given that for those that are gainfully employed, the available time left, excluding sleep and work averages out to about 9 hours of ‘free time’. For those in such a mode, 4.2 hours (US) would represent 46.7% of that free time spent on one’s phone, in theory. There are times when our phones are used for work and other important communication, but given TikTok’s popularity, it would seem that much of that time is being idled away watching videos of anonymous folk doing odd things. If that hasn’t changed the fabric of society, nothing will, but underlying it all is the need for content providers to hook you in to an ever increasing time on whatever application becomes tomorrow’s number one. Sure, you can quit anytime, right?
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