Have apps really passed mobile web? Not really.

Have apps really passed mobile web? Not really.

I’ve been seeing a lot of play on the newswire from the recent Flurry article on the ongoing native app vs mobile web debate titled “Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear-view Mirror”. Flurry is a great native app analytics provider — but I have to take issue with their data analysis and conclusions.

First — let’s discuss the statistical sample. As described in a well-written post by Jeffrey Gluick at Skyfire there are significant problems with the study from the perspective of sampling.  Read Gluick’s article for all the details, but key problems involve which types of users they’re measuring (the data report divides web browsing minutes over non-smart phone users and compares them to pure smart phone users in Flurry’s data set) and failing to accont for apps that are also web browsers  such as Skyfire, Opera, Firefox and Dolphin.

But let’s play along and ignore these problems for now.  Even with Flurry’s interpretation of the data, we see some interesting trends if we remove games and social networking from the equation:

Time spent on mobile, web vs apps excluding games and social networking

Whoops.  If you’re not a game or a social network — better bet on mobile web!

Flurry data shows that 47% of app time is spent on games and 32% on social networking.  Excluding these, mobile web is ahead by a country mile.  In fact, if you’re not in the gaming or social networking vertical, there couldn’t be a stronger argument to go with mobile web over an app.  Outside of gaming and social netorking, this data shows that smartphone users spend 4.5 times more time surfing the mobile web than interacting with apps that aren’t games or social networking!

Match that up with data from Google & the MMA which shows the average user has only interacted with 10 apps in the past month, of which the Flurry report suggests 7 are games or social networking (we can guess two more regularly used apps are a mail application and the mobile browser) and there’s only one unaccounted for app that the average mobile user uses on a monthly basis!

Google-MMA Global Perspectives Study Data p. 11