OMG, Mobile Use Grows 115 Percent Fueled by Messaging Apps

App Use Growth 2013-resized-600.jpgFlurry Analytics has just launched a new report on mobile device activity for 2013. Overall app usage grew by more than 100 percent last year with all categories showing an increase. However, what really pushed the numbers into the red in 2013 was messaging and social apps, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and SnapChat. It looks like mobile device users really want to keep in touch.

“Texting is so 2012. That’s like, something my mom would use. OMG, get on SnapChat so we can talk.”

According to Flurry’s research, messaging and social apps (including social and photo sharing) increased by 203 percent from 2012 to 2013. Thanks to a huge list of popular chat clients that allow person-to-person and group-to-group conversations to take place across multiple platforms in a variety of services, staying in touch all of the time has become the norm, not the exception.

Flurry also noted that, just before midnight on Dec. 31, 2013, there were 4.7 billion app sessions (opening and using an app) in a single day. That is a whole lot of “Happy New Year” pictures posted to Instagram, drunken well-wish video clips sent to Vine, and New Years resolution messages sent to Facebook friends.

Flurry’s information does not appear to include such services as Apple’s native Messaging service, or FaceTime. Both of which are social apps, but only work between iOS and OS X devices. It would be interesting to know how much iPad-to-iPad chatting has increased in 2013, especially with the ease and convenience of using Messaging in iOS 7.

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