Mobile apps' prime time? All the time

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Not only do Americans use apps on their smartphones constantly throughout the day, they're on mobile apps more than the traditional Internet.

Flurry, a company that specializes in mobile application analytics, recently issued a report that focuses on the prime time of mobile apps. As seen on the graph above, compared to TV viewing and Internet use, mobile apps command Americans' attention far more from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., with a peak at about 9 p.m. At that time, about 50 percent of iOS and Android device owners, or 50 million consumers, are using a mobile app.

"Mobile consumers are using apps either instead of, or along-side prime-time television and the [non-mobile] Internet," Flurry marketing VP Peter Farago writes in the report. "In fact, the percent of relative mobile app usage is greater than that of relative [non-mobile] Internet usage every hour of every day." 

Flurry tracks more than 110,000 mobile apps on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and J2ME. For this study, the company assembled "a bundle of popular iOS and Android apps across games, social networking, music, news, sports and communication categories" used by more than 15 million consumers daily. (To measure apps against the other forms of media engagement, Flurry used an already-released study that compared TV and traditional Internet data from Nielsen and comScore, respectively.)

If advertisers want to know where eyeballs are most of the day, they don't have to look far. To put this in perspective, Flurry estimates the audience for mobile apps is approximately 110 million.

"Consider that the 'American Idol' finale, which airs once per season, reaches approximately 20 million viewers on that day," Farago writes. "Mobile apps already reach more than 20 million U.S. consumers per hour, from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. That's already the equivalent of 17 'American Idol' finales each day, or more than 6,200 'American Idol' finales per year." 

What apps are you on during the day?

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