Nielsen publishes ‘The State of Mobile Apps’ for smartphones and feature phones so far in 2010
By David Gonzales on 02 Jun 10Since the introduction of the very first smartphone nearly two decades ago, a lot of things have changed. Many of today’s current generation of smartphones are fully capable of serving as all-in-one computing devices and the advances in mobile technology make these as suitable replacements for laptops or any other larger mobile computing device.
This has been made possible not only by the innovations brought forth in the hardware being used in smartphones, but also because of the now highly complex mobile software ecosystem that makes smartphones what they truly are. The mobile software boom really only started fairly recently, but there are already a lot of players involved. It’s getting kind of hard to keep up with all the changes happening in the mobile space, especially when it comes to gauging the performance of the different individual smartphone platforms.
Fortunately for us, we have Nielsen, which has just published what it calls “The State of Mobile Apps” wherein it has tabulated data gathered from a survey of 4,200 people who had downloaded a mobile application to their smartphone in the last 30 days. The results are as follows.
The games category shows the most number of downloads for both the smartphone and feature phone category. This is followed by music, social networking, news/weather, and mapping/navigation in terms of percentage of download. And as for the individual smartphone platforms, the most popular apps turn out to be either of these three: Facebook, Google Maps and the Weather Channel. It seems that people today are still using phones for their original intended purpose. That is, communication and connection with other people.
The above graphs show data for the BlackBerry OS, iPhone OS, Android OS and “all other smartphones” (note that as big as it still is, Symbian didn’t get its own detailed graphs).
Via NielsenWire
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