App Downloaders Are Most Willing to Pay for Games, Entertainment Apps and Productivity Apps
According to Nielsen, games are the most popular mobile app category. Games are also the category of apps that app downloaders are most willing to pay for.
In the second quarter of 2011, 64 percent of smartphone consumers played a game in the past 30 days, with iPhone, Windows 7 phone and Android phone owners the most likely to have downloaded the games they played. BlackBerry phone and feature phone owners tend to play pre-loaded games, according to Nielsen.
Weather apps were the second most used app, with 60 percent of smartphone users having used them in the quarter. Social networking (56 percent), maps/navigation/search (51 percent), music (44 percent), news (39 percent), entertainment (32 percent) and banking/finance (32 percent) were also popular mobile app categories in the second quarter.
According to Nielsen’s study, 93 percent of app downloaders said they would be willing to pay for games, while 87 percent said they would be willing to pay for entertainment apps.
Meanwhile, 84 percent said they would be willing to pay for productivity apps, 84 percent said they would be willing to pay for maps/navigation/search apps, 77 percent said they would be willing to pay for food apps and 76 percent said they would be willing to pay for news apps.
Mobile gamers on iOS phones spent an average of 14.7 hours per month playing mobile games in the second quarter, while Android gamers spent an average of 9.3 hours per month playing games.
Windows Phone 7 gamers spent 4.7 hours per month playing games, feature phone games spent 4.5 hours per month playing games and BlackBerry gamers spent 4.5 hours per month playing mobile games in the second quarter.
The average time spent playing mobile games was 7.8 hours per month in the second quarter, according to Nielsen.
A separate survey from Prosper Mobile Insights conducted in June found that 20.8 percent of smartphone/tablet users said their mobile device has replaced their gaming device.
Meanwhile, 61.1 percent said these devices replaced their alarm clock, 52.3 percent said they replaced their GPS, 44.3 percent said they replaced their digital camera, 41.6 percent said they replaced their personal planner and 40.3 percent said they replaced their landline phone.
Sources:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/games-most-popular-mobile-app-category/
