India spends most time on communication apps: Report

A new global report by Ericsson claims that 30 percent of time spent by users on all smartphone apps is on communication through voice, instant messaging, voice over internet protocol (such as Skype), emails and social networking.

Communication apps have a higher dependency on mobile broadband usage, due to their ‘always on’ status, it says.

According to the report, Indian users spend aroung 47 percent of their smartphone-usage time in communication including voice calls with utility and productivity tools claiming 14 percent of the time. Entertainment and gaming follows close behind with 11 percent and 10 percent respectively.

While voice calls account for 21 percent of the total time spent on communication, voice call over Internal and instant messaging (IM) accounts for 66 percent of the total time. Social networking comes in third with 11 percent followed by Email which accounts for just 2 percent.

WhatsApp Messenger is the most used of all IM apps followed by Hike, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts and WeChat.

As per the report, although smartphones have a wide range of functions such as entertainment, games and photography, communication continues to be the dominant activity with users spending time on communicating through voice, instant messaging, voice over internet protocol (such as Skype), emails and social networking.

“We found that 40-50 percent of data consumption for communication apps uses mobile broadband, whereas the corresponding figure for video is just 20 percent,” says Swetleena Swain, senior advisor at Ericsson ConsumerLab.

The report also finds out that culture and language influence communication patterns and the adoption of communication apps.
Smartphone users in Britain and the US make more voice calls while the Japanese and South Koreans prefer to text message and use locally-developed communication apps.

“Typically, the US apps are designed for an English-speaking audience, so it’s not surprising that these are predominant in English-speaking countries,” said Swain.

Ericsson released its new report, ‘communication in the world of apps’ from Ericsson ConsumerLab based on interviews with 100,000 individuals, in more than 40 countries and 15 megacities. The data has been gathered from smartphone users in India, Japan, South Korea, the UK and the USA.