The title of Flurry Analytics’ five-year anniversary report: “It’s an App World. The Web Just Lives in It.” The company reports that just 20 percent of the average American user’s time on a smartphone or tablet is spent on the mobile Web. Instead, gaming apps predominate, followed by Facebook—with many users linking to Web content within the social network’s app. According to Flurry, mobile consumers worldwide spend an average of nearly 30 minutes a day on Facebook (which yesterday announced its Facebook Home system, a bid to orient the phone around people more than apps, as Mark Zuckerberg explained it). Flurry also reports that the average number of apps launched per day is now 7.9, up from 7.2 in Q4 2010.
Looking ahead, Flurry sees the Web getting much more mobile focused: Mobile sites will not only “look and behave more like apps” but “be optimized for user experience first and search engine optimization second.” As Paul Berney of the Mobile Marketing Association recently told us, companies will “increasingly recognize that the mobile experience is not just a copy of the PC online experience,” with brands coming to a better understanding of the difference between the two. Looking beyond the app economy, check out our new report, “13 Mobile Trends for 2013 and Beyond,” here.
