1 research outputs found
Real World Longitudinal iOS App Usage Study at Scale
Given the importance of understanding the interaction between mobile devices
and their users, app usage patterns have been studied in various contexts.
However, prior work has not fully investigated longitudinal changes to app
usage behavior. In this paper, we present a longitudinal, large-scale study of
mobile app usage based on a dataset collected from 162,006 iPhones and iPads
over 4 years. We explore multiple dimensions of app usage pattern proving
useful insights on how app usage changes over time. Our key findings include
(i) app usage pattern changes over time both at the individual app level and
the app category level (i.e. proportion of time a user spends using an app),
(ii) users keep a small set of apps frequently launched (90% of iPhone users
launch roughly 14-18 apps weekly), (iii) a small number of apps remain popular
while some specific kinds of apps (e.g. Games) have a shorter life cycle
compared to other apps of different categories. Finally, we discuss our
findings and their implications, for example, a short-term study as an attempt
to understand the general needs of mobile devices may not achieve useful
results for the long term