A Handset-centric View of Smartphone Application Use

Studying the use of applications on smart phones is important for developers, handset designers and network operators. We conducted a study on Android devices by installing an instrumentation application, Device Analyzer, on participants’ handsets. Over a 4 month period we collected 10.9 billion records from 674 different users. In this paper we describe how to use the research study features of Device Analyzer to control participant selection and to access information (with consent) that is withheld for privacy reasons from the main dataset. We describe our data processing architecture and the steps required to preformat and analyse the data. Our data contains 3329 distinct applications (from the Google Play store) but despite this, on average, a user makes use of only 8 unique applications in a week. Almost 100% of our users make use of some email application on their phone. Fewer users (85%) made use of the Facebook application but 4–5 times more frequently than for email with sessions lasting almost twice as long. We also investigated whether different applications have correlated usage using a network analysis and a principal component analysis. We see that application usage tends to correlate by vendor more than by activity. This is potentially due to vendors integrating or cross-promoting services between applications.