Indians Spend 89 Percent Of Their Online Time On Mobile, Mostly Hooked On To WhatsApp & Youtube
According to a new report by analytics company ComScore, Indians spent close to 90 percent of their total time online last year on a mobile phone. This is the highest phone to PC online ratio anywhere in the world.
India is one of the fastest-growing smartphone markets in the world, and the effects show. That¡¯s why Indians are spending more time online on their phones that they are on computers.
According to a new report by analytics company ComScore, Indians spent close to 90 percent of their total time online last year on a mobile phone. This is the highest phone to PC online ratio anywhere in the world, with the global average of mobile-only users around 30 percent.
ComScore¡¯s data, shared with Times of India, showed that Indians spent 89 percent of their online time on a phone in 2017. Indonesia is the next-closest country, with citizens spending 87 percent of their time connecting through a mobile phone, while Mexico and Argentina came in at 80 and 77 percent respectively.
Is India addicted to smartphones?
The report says Indians spent as much as 3,000 minutes or 50 hours online on their phones last year, nearly three times the amount of time they spent on the Internet on PC (1,200 minutes). On the other hand, while we¡¯re more likely online on mobile than any other country, we¡¯re not spending as much time online. Argentina and the US consumed on average about 6,000 and 5,000 minutes in 2017 respectively, likely because Indians tend to be more frugal with our online charges (especially as we don¡¯t have as pervasive public WiFi)
However, just the last year has shown that the number of individual mobile to desktop Internet users has increased 400 percent, indicating just how pervasive data plans are becoming thanks to the recent steep drop in prices resulting from the telecom battle.
In addition, ComScore indicates most of us are accessing the Internet on our phones for messaging apps like WhatsApp and social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In fact, the top five most popular online app were WhatsApp, Google Play, YouTube, Gmail and Google Search, though Amazon India has reportedly seen a steep rise in popularity.
And WhatsApp was by far the biggest messaging app in the country last year. We used it 98 percent of the time (that we spent on messaging apps) with only 2 percent devoted to Facebook¡¯s Messenger.
