comScore Study: Mobile Browsing More Popular Than Mobile Apps In US

Two reports issued by comScore examine the functions which are most frequently used by consumers on their mobile device. The reports cover both the US and European markets, and reveal that in the US, almost 1/3 of mobile subscribers have used their phone to browse mobile websites.

In the US, 29.4% of mobile consumers use their mobiles to browse mobile websites. This represented an increase of 2.4 points compared to the previous three-month period and made browsing the mobile web the second most popular function after sending SMS messages (64%). A little surprisingly, more people in the US browsed the mobile web than used downloaded mobile applications (27.5%).

In comparison, a similar report published on the European market showed that 22.2% of mobile consumers use their mobiles to browse mobile websites. This was the fourth most popular function after sending SMS messages (83.5%), using downloaded applications (33.4%) and listening to music (22.7%).

Also, these figures vary quite significantly from country to country, with mobile browsing being more popular in the UK (30.8%). Mobile browsing is much less in popular in Germany (17.4%) where using downloaded mobile applications is a lot more popular (33.3%).

A similar trend is noticeable in Spain, which leads in the use of mobile applications (36.1%) and listening to music (28.7%) but has a much lower uptake of the mobile web (19.9%). Another clear trend is that the uptake of non-voice functions is consistently lower among French consumers than other European consumer.

The reports also looked at the market share of the different smartphone operating systems.

It found that US consumers where increasing their acceptance ofAndroid (+5.2 points giving it a market share of 9%). The main losers were Microsoft (-4 points giving it a market share of 15.1%) and Palm(-1.8 points giving it a market share of 5.4%). RIM (42.1%) and Apple(25.4%) remained the dominant players.