Handful of Apps Drive Most Usage

• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 27, 2011

Despite the hundreds of thousands of mobile apps available, people tend to rely on just a handful on a regular basis. In an OMMA panel taking up the Great Apps V. Web Debate, Ashmeed Ali, director of mobile insights at Yahoo, said reasearch the company has done shows users have 34 apps on average on their moible device. But only four are used on daily basis.  Yahoo also found 55% of apps aren't meeting user expecations, and 43% felt their apps werent properly organized on their phone so they couldn't easily find a particular one.

Between apps and the Web, David Gill, VP, mobile media and marketing for the Nielsen Company, said people are spending 55% to 60% of their time on apps because the mobile Web experience is still less user-friendly. He also pointed out that the top 50 apps in the Android Market account for 60% of usage, again reinforcing how critical it is for publishers to land in that top group of titles in Android or the App Store. The good news, from a developer standpoint, is that the top 50 titles tends to turn over fairly rapidly from month to month.