Survey: Games Most Popular Smartphone Apps

And surprise, most people will pay for apps

Games, weather and social networking apps are where people are spending a tremendous amount of their time followed by mapping, news, music and entertainment. These are the results of a new survey from Nielsen which asks what apps people used in the last 30 days. iPhone users who are mobile gamers play about 30 minutes per day on average or 14.7 hours per month while Android users play 9.3 hours per month.

Nielsen supplied chart of apps which smartphone users have downloaded in the last 30 days
nielsen-mobile-gaming-chart-1.gif

While we see mega deals in the video game world for titles like Angry Birds and social companies like Zynga preparing for multi-billion dollar IPOs – let’s keep in mind part of the reason for this is that everyone it seems will pay for games on their phones. Consider in fact Nielsen found 93 percent of app downloaders are willing to pay for the games they play. In contrast, only 76 percent of downloaders are willing to pay for news apps. This is a 22% increase and in a  terrible economic environment. If the economy was better the number would likely be close to 100%!

What is fascinating however is that iOS users will spend twice as much time playing games as the average mobile gamer – part of the reason of course is feature phone and RIM users have less attractive platforms for gaming.

Another interesting tidbit is communications in the form of IM and VoIP are used about 20% of the time and sadly, education/learning is the second to last category at 11%.

While 93% of users would pay for game apps only 76% would pay for news apps. Navigation apps scored 84% and this makes sense as the cost of such apps can be deducted because users won’t need a separate GPS unit.

The takeaway here is the app economy is alive and well and growing fast.

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