Games Are Most Popular Apps, Study Finds
Smartphones are good for so many things, but it seems users are most fascinated about the potential for mobile gaming, judging by a new study. Market research firm Nielsen released data showing that the most popular category of app downloads is games.
Nielsen's Mobile Insights and Mobile Apps Playbooks included download numbers for apps in the last three months. They showed that 64 percent of smartphone users in a survey who had downloaded an app in the last 30 days had downloaded a game.
That doesn't mean that other app categories are necessarily suffering. Nielsen reported that 60 percent of users had downloaded a weather app, and 56 percent had downloaded social networking apps. Maps (51 percent), music (44 percent), news (39 percent) and other entertainment apps (34 percent) followed.
People aren’t just downloading these games and forgetting them, especially iPhone users. Nielsen found that iPhone users spend 14.7 hours per month on mobile gaming , nearly twice the industry average. Android users averaged 9.3 hours of mobile gaming and Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry users spent less than 5 hours.
Mobile game developers will also be happy by results showing that people are more willing to pay for game apps than any other kind of app. The study found that 93 percent of app downloaders are willing to pay for games, while 87 percent would pay for entertainment apps, 84 percent would pay for productivity and navigation apps and 76 percent would pay for news apps.
