My very first blog contribution here at MarketStar was entitled “What’s Your “App-titude”? In the post I pontificated on the future of the app and generally what consumers are looking for in the content they allow on their personal devices.

In the last few months I’ve been drawn into a very exciting program where we are actually attempting to influence the consumer at the point-of-sale in regards to what applications
they might want or need on their smartphone. Why would a company want to invest so heavily in influencing engagement with free mobile content? A recent study released by Nielsen Smartphone Analytics confirms some of their foresight.

The study found that the average Android user spends 56 minutes per day engaged in online- or app-driven interaction. Of those 56 minutes, the majority (67 percent) of that time was allocated to app interaction. More compelling was the finding that most people only use a small handful of apps with any regularity. The top-10 most popular Android apps account for 43 percent of all the time Android users engage with mobile apps. Expanding that list to the top-50 and you account for 61 percent of all app engagement.

While this research was limited to Android devices, I imagine a similar trend will reveal itself once the iOS study is released. What this means for app developers is that their success is inherently tied to their ability to get into, and then remain in, the “top downloads” charts. While the quality of the experience the app delivers is an obvious must, with hundreds of thousands of apps to choose from, marketing of the app to promote awareness will become even more critical.