30 percent increase in Screen time since 2019 with an average of 4.2 hours being consumed per day

The Corona Virus pandemic has brought a change globally. According to a report published by App Annie which is an analytical company that deals with mobile data, the screen time for the users has gone up to 4.2 hours per day. This means that the screen time rate has increased very heavily by up to 30% as compared to two years back in 2019. And in some regions, the time rate average has even crossed the 5 hours limit.

Studying the first quadrant of the year 2021 showed that the screen time has gone up crossing 4 hours in US, Mexico, India and Turkey. Among these four major countries that witnessed a rise in screen time, India was affected the most as it was observed that user time had gone up to 80% in the early months of 2021 as compared to the early months of 2019.

Meanwhile last year in their report Nielsen stated that around 4.5 hours were spent by Americans, watching a live or pre recorded television show and only 3 hours and 46 minutes on an average were being consumed by the apps present in the smartphones. However the reports formed by Nielsen and the one formed by App Annie cannot be compared analytically because the fact that App Annie works only on devices powered by Android whereas iPhone is the first preference for most of the Americas, can not be neglected. On the other hand Nielsen works by attaining a representative sampling on the panel. Hence it could be inferred that smartphones have the upper hand when it comes to being the most common entertainment source.

As mentioned above, there are some regions that have crossed the 5 hours limit when it comes to calculate the average screen time. These regions include Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea. It may be easy to identify the regions with increasing screen time rate however, the apps responsible for this rapid increase can not be identified easily as the quarter after quarter remains the same for many of the famous installed applications , these famous applications includes Tiktok, Facebook and YouTube. This is the reason why App Annie now keeps a track of the “breakout apps,”. These breakout apps are the one that had a spike in their quarter to quarter downloads across both the iOS as well as Android.

The Western markets, in the early 2021, had an intense rise in two secured messaging applications namely Telegram and Signal. Signal was found to be on the first position in United Kingdom, France and Germany and in US it was on the fourth position. On the other side, Telegram secured 9th position in UK, 5th in France and 7th in US. Based on this Signal was referred as the breakout app in US. While the secured messaging apps were going up the online currency apps also had a rise simultaneously. The 6th position in both US and UK was taken by Coinbase’s crypto app meanwhile Binance was found to be on number 7 in France. Crypto trading app Upbit was number 1 in South Korea whereas the payment app Paypay was present at the number one position in Japan leaving US behind in which it was on the second position.

Not only this but the audio only chat application, Clubhouse was also able to secure 3rd and 4th position in Japan in Germany respectively. China’s breakout app list was a bit different in comparison with others as in China , users were more focused on video apps such as Kwai, Capcut, TikTok and iQIYI.

Gaming apps were not to be left behind in this scenario as Tiktok itself had an impact on gaming applications in this quarter. Istanbul based rollic, High Heel after being advertised on Tiktok, managed to be number 1 on both US and U.K’s list of breakout games and was also able to come at the 3rd , 6th and 7th number in China, Russia and Germany respectively. Other games including DOP 2 and Phone Case DIY also managed to do well and lastly Crash Bandicoot came up with a huge entrance as in just 4 days , the game saw 21 million downloads and had its name in the breakout app list in Germany, while being at 2nd and 3rd number in US and UK and at number 7 in France.
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