BII REPORT: Here's What Smartphone Users Are Doing With Their Phones

According to eMarketer, mobile now accounts for 12 percent of Americans' media consumption time, triple its share in 2009.

Where is this consumer attention being focused?

The biggest beneficiaries have been mobile apps. Time spent on apps dwarfs time spent on the mobile Web, and smartphone owners now spend 127 minutes per day in mobile apps.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we analyze the main mobile usage trends developers and publishers should consider to be successful in mobile, detail how users are consuming content on their mobile devices, take a look at the most popular mobile activities, and examine how mobile usage is an additive activity.

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Here's a brief breakdown of the most important mobile usage trends:

• Mobile gaming has become a juggernaut: Mobile games are the biggest time bucket of the mobile app era. According to Flurry, games account for 43% of the time spent on mobile apps on iOS and Android. Not surprisingly, games, which are usually monetized through in-app purchases, are also the biggest app money-makers. According to a BII analysis of Apple's App Store, games accounted for 70% of the top-grossing apps in the store.
• Social and mobile usage and monetization is exploding: Social networking is the second most popular mobile app category, accounting for 26% of time spent in apps. The percentage of all U.S. mobile users that accessed a social network on their phone rose from 14% in September 2009 to 39% in November, according to comScore. The growth of mobile social underscores that companies like Twitter and Facebook are now essentially mobile businesses. Mobile is not a superfluous sideshow, but central to these companies' businesses.
• Weather, video, email, and search are all increasingly popular mobile activities: As of September, comScore reported 46% of U.S. mobile subscribers have accessed email on their phone, 40% checked the weather, 36% used a search engine, and 31% looked at maps. Mobile video is the third most popular smartphone activity in the U.S., with two-thirds of smartphone owners watching at least an hour of video weekly, according to a study released in December by the IAB. This has had several unforeseen consequences and knock-on effects.
• A lot of mobile content consumption is additive: Mobile users consume plenty of other media content through their devices as well, including reading the news and listening to music. comScore reports that 29% of U.S. mobile users accessed the news through their device in September and that 29% of American mobile users listened to music on their phones (up from 12% in September 2009). Changing listening habits have not resuscitated flagging record sales, but the landscape has changed. Spotify and Pandora, which both pre-date the smartphone revolution, have grown huge user bases and are now essentially mobile app companies.

The report is full of charts and data that can be easily accessed, downloaded, and put to use.