Smartphone use up 24% in March

Driven largely by the lockdown, the time spent by Indians on smartphones increased by 24% to 4.3 hours per day in march, as per data from analytics firm app annie of android phones. It was 3.5 hours a day on average in 2019. During the lockdown, consumers have spent increasing time on mobile games like PUBG, social networks like Tiktok and Facebook, besides using video-chatting applications like Zoom for interacting with friends and family, for office work and for online classes.

according to reports, the rise in time spent on smartphones is part of a global trend. The countries worst impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, Italy and Spain, saw even higher spikes of 34% and 28%, respectively. But as lockdown restrictions ease in the future, total time spent may go down if numbers from China are an indication. When the country was under complete lockdown in February, it saw a 30% increase in time to 5 hours; by march, when restrictions eased, it came down to 4.3 hours, as per app annie. But it was still a gain of 12% from 2019, when it was 3.9 hours.

India also witnessed the biggest jump in video consumption of 40% to over 2.9 billion hours during the week starting march 22 as compared to the last week of December 2019, when it was 2.1 billion hours. Indonesia saw a jump of just 15%. Video streaming platforms in India like Hotstar, Netflix and mx Player had agreed to suspend high definition video broadcasting and stick to just lower resolution standard definition (SD) on march 25 to reduce the load on telecom networks. app annie also finds that Indians are increasingly spending on healthcare and meditation applications during the lockdown. ■

team@mymobile.co.in