• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, November 28, 2016

The 100 most popular apps keep hogging more and more of consumers’ time, according to fresh finding from Opera Mediaworks.

In the first quarter of the year, people spent an average of 30 minutes with top apps; 33.5 minutes in the second quarter; and, so far, they are spending an average of 36.9 minutes in the third quarter.

“That’s a 20.5% jump in just six months,” said Falguni Bhuta, VP, Global Communications & Engagement Marketing at the mobile ad platform.

The average amount of time that mobile users spend with apps is around five minutes. By contrast, the average session time in the Top 100 on has stayed steady at around 9-to-10 minutes throughout the year.

Meanwhile, the average iPhone user opens their phone 80 times a day, and a study of Android users showed a similar number – 76 phone sessions a day. That means during waking hours, mobile users open their phone about once every 13 minutes.

These “mobile breaks” might last a few seconds, or they might last a few minutes or more. It all depends on the user, the time of day, which types of apps they are using.

More broadly, all these breaks are certainly contributing to an increasingly fragmented media marketplace.

“While there are many factors that are contributing to this trend, one that we’ve witnessed is how consumers are no longer dedicating large, predictable (8-11pm) blocks of time to television,” according to Bhuta.

 “Instead, their media time is split, fragmented across screens and platforms, and it is also split into smaller chunks of time throughout the course of a day.”