Percentage Of App Users Deemed 'Mobile Addicts' Growing Rapidly
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Is there such a thing as mobile app addiction?
If you base your answer on the results of some new data, the answer seems to be a resounding yes.
Mobile company Flurry Analytics says it used its own data to first determine what constitutes a "Mobile Addict" and then to determine how that percentage of the population has been growing.
Flurry says the average consumer appears to open apps about 10 times daily, leading them to define a "Mobile Addict" as someone who launches apps at least 60 times per day – six times more than the average person.
According to a series of charts posted on their website, the "Mobile Addicts" category is the fastest growing portion of the mobile app-using population. While regular users were up 23% from March 2013 to 2014 and super users up 55%, Flurry says the percentage of mobile addicts is up 123% over the same time period.
Furthermore, Flurry calculated that female Mobile Addicts outnumber men by 8% -- or 15 million. And oddly enough, those most likely to be Mobile Addicts were teens (13-17), young adults (18-24) and those categorized as "middle aged," or between 35 and 54 years old. Those between the ages of 25 and 34 actually "under-indexed."
So, are you a "Mobile Addict"? If so, you should know that recent research out of Stanford found that "media multitaskers" -- or people who are "regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information" -- were more easily distracted, didn't pay attention, couldn't control their memory and were less able to switch from one task to another than those who preferred to do one thing at a time.
For more information on Flurry's data, click here.