• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 22, 2017

While Snap’s stock remains a risky bet, Snapchat has cemented its position as a top app over the past year.

That’s clear from a new comScore report, which shows Snapchat breaking into the Top 10 most popular apps in late 2016.

“Snapchat … went from being a very popular app among the younger demographics to  being one of the most popular apps among the general population,” Adam Lella, senior analyst at comScore, said on Tuesday.

Critically, Snapchat’s general popularity has yet to undercut its status among Millennials, according to comScore’s 2017 Cross-Platform Future in Focus report.

At the end of 2016, a whopping 78% of U.S. consumers ages 18-to-24s -- and 48% of those 25-to-34 -- were using Snapchat. 

More broadly, smartphones propelled total digital media usage -- up 40% from 2013 to the end of 2016, comScore reports.

The smartphone has continued to expand on its role in digital, even in just the last two years, as desktop and tablets both experienced modest declines in engagement during this period.

In March 2016, mobile media usage surpassed the 1 trillion-monthly-minute milestone, and it has since continued to rise. At the end of that year, the average U.S. consumer 2 hours and 51 minutes per day on their mobile gadgets.

More impressive, mobile now represents almost seven in 10 digital media minutes. Smartphone apps alone account for half of all digital time spent.

Nearly one in eight U.S. Web users are now mobile-only, with women 18 to 24 the highest-skewing for this behavior.

The report is based primarily on behavioral measurement from comScore Media Metrix Multi-Platform, which provides unduplicated reporting of digital audiences across desktop computers, smartphones and tablets; comScore Mobile Metrix, which provides unduplicated reporting of mobile web and app audiences across both smartphones and tablets; and comScore Video Metrix Multi-Platform, which provides a single, unduplicated measure of digital video consumption across smartphones, tablets, desktops and over-the-top devices.