The battle between iOS and Android is long from over. In every Smartphone arena, the battle between these two tech giants relentlessly rages on and recently, there has been a somewhat stunning discovery about the users and their smartphones, especially the users of Apple and Android.
Battle For Time
Americans spend 58 minutes a day on their smartphones
As Android is an Open Source mobile platform, people might think that it has more things to keep its users occupied at all times. However, that is not what Experian Marketing Services research says. According to their research, iPhone users spend more time on their handsets as compared to Android users. But this does not mean that iPhone users clock more talk time on their handsets as compared to Android users, because this is where Android users have taken the lead.
The research was done on the Smartphone users in U.S. alone, so if you are disagreeing with this research because you live across the Pacific, then do not bother. Overall, the average American Adult spends around one hour per day on his or her smartphone. But when it comes to talk time, they only spend a quarter of time talking on their phones as compared to the time they use it for every day. The main reason for conducting this study was to find out more about the increasing shift of consumer tastes to mobile devices for their information and entertainment.
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Voice calling was the most popular activity on smartphones for U.S. users. 26 percent of smartphone usage comprises of voice calling according to the recent study, which is about 15 minutes a day. Texting wasn’t far behind voice calling, taking 20 percent of the smartphone activity, or nearly 12 minutes. Texting was followed by social networking and Web Surfing with 16 percent and 14 percent respectively.
Comparing other smartphone activities, adult Americans spent almost the same amount of time e-mailing as they did playing games on their smartphones, with 9 percent and 8 percent of average usage. The least used features of smartphones by Americans were camera and GPS functionality.
“Smartphone users may constantly debate which operating system is supreme, but we see clear differences between the ways consumers use their phone depending on the operating system that runs it,”
The findings of the study showed very different usage patterns depending on the operating system of the smartphone. On one hand, iPhone users spent an average of 1 hour 15 minutes on their devices in total, whereas Android users only logged in an average of 49 minutes usage. But the real difference is in the features users used, where android users spent 28 percent of their smartphone usage talking on their smartphones as compared with the 22 percent of iPhone users, and they spent almost the same amount of time texting on their Android devices.
“Smartphone users may constantly debate which operating system is supreme, but we see clear differences between the ways consumers use their phone depending on the operating system that runs it,” senior marketing manager for Experian’s consumer insights group, John Fetto said in a statement.
The differences that this study brought to light can help Smartphone manufacturers a lot in making their smartphones better. First, Smartphone users can look at the grey areas and / or the areas which were almost totally neglected by Smartphone users. Smartphone manufacturers can look into these areas and try to bring innovation and creativity to increase user’s interest in these areas. On the other hand, smart phone manufacturers can also work on improving the areas where their smartphones functionality is giving the most output. This could greatly help them to improve usability of their products and introduce new features for these areas to keep the users interested. Now, it is up to smart phone manufacturers to use this study for their benefit and to make their smartphones even smarter than before.
