Overview

Cell phone use in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past decade. Fully eight-in-10 adults today (82%) are cell phone users, and about one-quarter of adults (23%) now live in a household that has a cell phone but no landline phone.

Along with the widespread embrace of mobile technology has come the development of an “apps culture.” As the mobile phone has morphed from a voice device to a multi-channel device to an internet-accessing mini-computer, a large market of mobile-software applications, or “apps,” has arisen.

Among the most popular are apps that provide some form of entertainment (games, music, food, travel and sports) as well as those that help people find information they need and accomplish tasks (maps and navigation, weather, news, banking). With the advent of the mobile phone, the term “app” has become popular parlance for software applications designed to run on mobile phone operating systems, yet a standard, industry-wide definition of what is, and is not, an “app” does not currently exist. For the purpose of this report, apps are defined as end-user software applications that are designed for a cell phone operating system and which extend the phone’s capabilities by enabling users to perform particular tasks.

The most recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey asked a national sample of 1,917 cell phone-using adults if they use apps and how they use them. Broadly, the results indicate that while apps are popular among a segment of the adult cell phone-using population, a notable number of cell owners are not yet part of the emerging apps culture.

35% of adults have cell phones with apps, but only two-thirds of those who have apps actually use them.

Of the 82% of adults today who are cell-phone users, 43% have software applications or “apps” on their phones. When taken as a portion of the entire U.S. adult population, that equates to 35% who have a cell phone with apps. This figure includes adult cell phone users who:

• Have downloaded an app to their phone (29% of adult cell phone users).
• Have purchased a phone with preloaded apps (38% of adult cell phone users).

Yet having apps and using apps are not synonymous. Of those who have apps on their phones, only about two-thirds of this group (68%) actually use that software. Overall, that means that 24% of U.S. adults are active apps users. Older adult cell phone users in particular do not use the apps that are on their phones, and one-in-10 adults with a cell phone (11%) are not even sure if their phone is equipped with apps.

Apps users are younger, more educated and more affluent than other cell phone users.

When compared with other cell phone using adults, and the entire U.S. adult population, the apps user population skews male, and is much younger, more affluent and more educated than other adults. Overall, the apps-using population also skews slightly Hispanic when compared with other adult cell phone users.

App use still ranks relatively low when compared with other uses of cell phones.

While 24% of adults, and 29% of adults with cell phones, use applications on their phones, apps use still ranks relatively low when compared with other non-voice cell phone activities. Taking pictures and texting are far and away the most popular non-voice cell phone data applications, with more than seven-in-10 adult cell phone users embracing these features of their phones.

29% of adult cell-phone users have downloaded an app to their phone.

As with the apps-using population as a whole, downloaders are younger, more educated and disproportionately male when compared with the total U.S. adult population. And while they resemble adults who only have preloaded apps in terms of education, they are still disproportionately young and male even when compared with this group.

One-in-10 adult cell-phone users (10%) had downloaded an app in the past week; 20% of cell-phone users younger than age 30 download apps this frequently.

Those who download apps do so fairly frequently. Among apps downloaders, roughly half (53%) say their most recent download was in the past 30 days, including one-third (33%) who say their last download was within the past week. As a fraction of all cell phone-using adults, that equates to 15% who have downloaded apps in the past month, and 10% who have downloaded apps in the past week. Among cell-phone users younger than age 30, 20% have downloaded an app in the past week.

One-in-eight adult cell phone users (13%) have paid to download an app.

Among the 29% of adult cell-phone users who download apps, just under half (47%) have paid for an app, with the remainder saying they only download apps that are free. Put in broader context, that means that 13% of all adult cell phone users have paid to download an app to their phone. There are few notable demographic differences between downloaders who pay for apps and those who do not.

Among cell-phone users with apps, the average adult has 18 apps on his or her phone.

Among adult cell-phone users who have software applications on their cell phones, the mean number of apps is 18. However, the median number of apps is 10, indicating there are heavy apps users on the high end of the response scale who have a disproportionate number of apps on their phones. This is particularly true among the youngest adults.

Again, there is some uncertainty among cell-phone users, particularly older cell-phone users, about what software they have on their phones. Fully 18% of cell-phone users with apps on their phones do not know how many they have. That figure doubles to 36% among cell-phone users ages 50 and older.

Findings from the Nielsen Apps Playbook Survey

Nielsen data indicate that games are the most popular apps, followed by news/weather, maps/navigation, social networking and music.

In addition to drawing on results from the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s own nationwide probability sample of 2,252 adults, this report also presents findings from The Nielsen Company’s Apps Playbook, a December 2009 survey of a nonprobability sample of 3,962 adult cell phone subscribers who had downloaded an app in the previous 30 days. Although the Nielsen survey cannot be projected to the population of all app downloaders with a known degree of accuracy, it provides an extensive snapshot of the types of apps people are downloading and a broad sense of how they are using them.

Among the recent downloaders Nielsen surveyed, game apps were the most downloaded apps overall in terms of both volume and the percentage of adults who had downloaded them. In terms of actual apps use, six-in-10 of Nielsen’s recent downloaders (60%) said they had used a game app in the past 30 days, and roughly half said they had used a news/weather app (52%), a map/navigation app (51%) or a social networking app (47%) in that same timeframe. While music apps ranked second on the most downloaded list, they ranked fifth on the most used list.

In the Nielsen survey, most recent apps downloaders said they used their apps daily but for short periods of time, and used them in a variety of situations.

Some 57% of the recent apps downloaders in the Nielsen study said they use their apps daily. While one-quarter of these recent apps downloaders (24%) said they use their apps for more than 30 minutes a day, the vast majority said they spend less time using their apps each day.

Asked where they use their apps most frequently, 71% of the Nielsen sample said they frequently used their apps when they were alone, and about half said they frequently used their apps while waiting for someone or something (53%) or while at work (47%). One-in-three (36%) said they frequently used apps while commuting.

The Nielsen survey indicates that different people may use apps in different ways.

There were several notable differences among the Nielsen recent-downloader sample in terms of which apps they favored and how frequently they used them. For instance:

• Women in the sample were more likely than men to have used a social networking app in the past 30 days (53% vs. 42%), and women who used the Facebook app were also more likely to use that app everyday (64% vs. 55%).
• Women in the sample were more likely than men to have a used a game app in the past 30 days (63% vs. 58%), while men were more likely to have used a productivity app (29% vs. 21%) or a banking/finance app (31% vs. 25%).
• Among the Nielsen sample of recent downloaders, whites (53%) and Hispanics (47%) were more likely than African Americans (36%) to have used a map/navigation/search app in the month prior to the survey.
• Hispanics, on the other hand, were the most likely to have used a music app recently (48% of Hispanics vs. 42% of whites vs. 42% of African Americans).
• In the Nielsen sample, 75% of 18 to 24 year old Twitter app users reported using that app every day, compared with 52% of the 25 to 34 year olds and 48% of Twitter users ages 35 and older.
• In contrast, among Nielsen’s Facebook app users, 25 to 34 year olds were more likely than both younger and older Facebook app users to report using their Facebook app daily.
• The African Americans and Hispanics in the Nielsen sample were significantly more likely than whites to be daily users of their YouTube apps (33% of African Americans vs. 24% of Hispanics vs. 12% of whites) and their Pandora music apps (33% of African Americans vs. 27% of Hispanics vs. 14% of whites).

The Nielsen study indicates that cell phone screen real estate is valuable

Slight majorities of Nielsen’s recent app downloaders said they organize their apps so that the most frequently used are easily accessible (59%), and that they delete apps from their phones that are not useful or helpful (56%). And this culling process happens relatively quickly; among those who had deleted an app, 62% said they usually do it within two weeks of downloading the software. The men in the Nielsen sample deleted apps more quickly than women; 40% of the male recent-downloaders said they delete apps they did not find useful within a week, compared with 29% of the women.

Continue reading the full report at pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/internet.