A recent study reveals that the use of apps and mobile web goes up in relative terms in the evening and night time, whereas traditional communication services capture more user attention in the day time.

In order to arrive at these finding, which will be of use to advertisers looking to target ad placement, the mobile analytics company, Zokem, analyzed a dataset of more than 10 000 smartphone users, including 6.5 million distinct smartphone application usage sessions in 16 countries during 2009 and 2010.

Zokem compared the relative use of smartphones at different parts of the day, calculating an index for each of the main smartphone activities (browsing, voice, messaging and apps) by comparing the number of usage sessions per category to the total number all usage sessions in a particular hour.

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The analysts concluded:

"As expected, voice and messaging dominate day time usage, but fall towards the night as people communicate less through calls and messaging in the night time. Voice drops quicker than messaging, perhaps because it is a more business oriented service.

In absolute terms, day time usage is still higher than evening time usage for all categories (Figure 2), but interestingly mobile apps and web browsing are stronger in the evening and night time, at least in relative terms."

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