Time spent on social & messaging apps grew by an astounding 394 per cent in 2016

NEW DELHI: Time spent on social and messaging apps grew by an astounding 394 per cent over the last year, proving to be the driver that helped mobiles achieve year-over-year time-spent growth of 69 per cent globally, a report by Yahoo-owned research firm Flurry said on Friday.

Overall app usage grew by 11 per cent compared to 2015.

"Over the last year, the Flurry footprint grew to track more than 940,000 applications, across 2.1 billion devices in 3.2 trillion sessions. In this context, we define app usage as a user opening an app and recording what we call a 'session' as well as the amount of time spent in the application," said Simon Khalaf, Senior Vice President, Yahoo, in a statement.

While messaging and social applications drove year-over-year session growth at 44 per cent, the session usage in personalisation category was 46 per cent.

The gaming category saw time-spent decline by four per cent year-over-year, the findings showed.

While the news and magazines sessions were down five per cent, music, media and entertainment was up only one per cent.

"In the previous years, we saw all app categories growing in tandem, however, this year the story is different. After shifting the web and television to the rearview mirror, mobile apps started eating their own, with session and time-spent growth in some app categories occurring at the expense of others," added Khalaf.