Home iPad Owners Use News Apps Longer and Play Games More Often

iPad Owners Use News Apps Longer and Play Games More Often

Mobile application analytics company Localytics has spent time researching how users interact with their iPads and found that users spend the most time with news apps while games were the most frequented apps. Localytics measures usage sessions of apps that have it installed and the data in the study comes from monitoring when apps were opened and subsequently closed. Localytics findings show the cross-section of the app market that can be a good source for developers that want to understand how their audience is interacting with their applications.

Compared with the average user session of an iPad app, users used their news apps two-and-a-half times longer than the average app. Music apps, like Pandora or Spotify, averaged nearly two times the average usage. Sports, entertainment and games were the low items for average session length while games had the most sessions per month. Check out the charts below for more details.

Localytics notes that news apps generate the longest user sessions. That means that apps like Flipboard and Zite tend to be open longer than other apps. The company notes “iPad users appear to be playing short, more casual games, rather than in-depth time-consuming ones.” This may not be the truth though as time-consuming games, like Strategery or Order & Chaos can be closed or board games like chess can be closed and then re-opened to the same point in the game that the user left from. That would fit in well with the Pew Internet survey a few weeks ago that said that consumers are more likely to use their mobile when they are bored (often when travelling, per se).

Note the graph of the longest app session times.

Reference and health apps also do well in session length. These apps involve reading and research, which tend to be time consuming activities where people are out to accomplish a specific point, such as find the days news, business trends, recipe etc. Though reference apps have long user sessions, they do are not opened frequently in comparison to music, games or news. Music is not surprising for its long session length. For instance, my iPad has taken over as my primary point for music and plays like a radio all day while I work.

The antithesis is games. See the chart on session frequency.

Localytics notes, “the iPad’s reputation as a reading and gaming device appears to be well deserved.”

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