By ALEX MINDLIN March 6, 2011
The average smartphone owner spends 667 minutes a month using apps. That is more time spent with apps than spent talking on a smartphone or using it to browse the Web. But not all smartphones are equally friendly to apps.
Programmers have an easier time designing apps for iPhones and Android phones, giving these devices a much broader pool to draw from. Users of those devices fire up twice as many apps a month as BlackBerry users do, according to Zokem, a research firm. Zokem tracked the behavior of 2,100 British and American smartphone users in January using software installed on their phones.
The most popular app to download is the game Angry Birds. But only 5 percent of users played that game in the month that Zokem measured. That pattern is typical for a game, said Hannu Verkasalo, the chief executive of Zokem. "For many games, the usage is quite sporadic. People download a game, try it a few times, and then it falls away," he said.
- ALEX MINDLIN