Smartphone Survey Shows Communication is Secondary on Gadgets

Restaurant and travel apps are largely ignored

Advertising research group Nielsen Company has just published the results of their Mobile Apps Playbook survey, the data paints an intriguing portrait of what trends are fueling the skyrocketing sales of smartphones like the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: APPL) iPhone and Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Droid powered by the Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android operating system.

Nielsen began surveying 4000 mobile phone owners, covering both older feature phone users and smartphone users, last December and what they found is that downloadable apps aren’t just a marketing trend. People are downloading them, using them, and paying for them with increasing frequency.

While only 9% of those feature phone users surveyed said that they had downloaded an app for their phone in the past month, a whopping 59% of smartphone users had downloaded a new app in the same time frame. While the types of apps most favored by users have a great deal of crossover between the new and old technology—the overwhelming leader in apps is video games, with 61% of smartphone users downloading games alongside 52% of feature phone users—some app types, like instant message clients, were largely ignored. In addition to video games, the most commonly used types of apps are, unsurprisingly, weather reporting and search tools, particularly map and directions apps. These are followed closely by social networking apps such as Facebook and Twitter, then music apps such as Apple’s iTunes, news reporting services, and general entertainment. More than 30% of smartphone users avail themselves of these types of apps. Less than 30%, however, use general lifestyle maintenance apps, like banking, shopping, and travel tools. Some of the app types most heavily promoted in Droid and iPhone advertising campaigns, such as travel and food guides, are used by less than 20% of smartphone users.

App usage data paints one part of the bigger picture that investors and businesses alike should pay attention to in Nielsen’s report. The other component is the group’s finding that young people are increasingly likely to notice and interact with in-app advertising. 58% of teenagers surveyed looked at mobile ads. The technology, it seems, isn’t the only thing changing. The very venue where the most coveted demographic in consumer culture can be reached has shifted from television to Web browsers in the past fifteen years, and now it appears to be moving again.

There are currently 234 million smartphone subscribers in the United States. Between November of 2009 and February of 2010, that number gained 21% of its total. In just three months at the beginning of the year, 45.4 million smartphones were sold. That was six months before the launch of the iPhone 4, the Droid X, and even would-be contenders to the throne like Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows Phone 7. As businesses look for new ways to rekindle consumer interest after two years of weak spending and advertising sales dwindle in traditional venues like television, magazines, and even websites, it would appear that the greatest opportunities lie in the palms of customers’ hands.September 2010 | By Anthony Agnello


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