Apps increasingly popular: Number of heavy users rises by 59 percent

APPS More than a quarter of a billion people use an app on their tablet or smartphone more than 60 times a day. The use of mini-programs is generally on the rise. The number of heavy users in particular has risen sharply year-on-year. Check the weather forecast for the next day, send a chat message to a friend or order a smartphone cover from a designer: There are apps for almost everything these days - and we are using them more and more. This is made clear by figures collected by Flurry Analytics. The Yahoo subsidiary uses its analysis tools to provide developers with ongoing information on how their apps are being used.Flurry Analytics is used in more than 540,000 apps. According to a study by Flurry, the majority of the 1.8 billion app users - namely 985 million people worldwide - access apps up to 16 times a day. The number of these users has risen by a quarter compared to 2014 (26%). The group of users who use an app on their smartphone or tablet up to 60 times a day has grown even faster - by 34%, or from 440 million to 590 million - while the number of heavy users who use apps more than 60 times a day is less than half as large. However, it has grown particularly strongly, increasing by 59% in just one year - from 176 million to 280 million. If all heavy users lived in one country, it would have been the eighth largest in the world in 2014 and would already be in fourth place today, behind the USA and ahead of Indonesia.Heavy users: six times more likely to use messaging and social media appsThe group identified as heavy users in the study uses apps in all categories more frequently than other users. Five types of tablet and smartphone applications stood out in particular: heavy users access them at least twice as often as the average user. Messaging and social media services are by far the most popular. Heavy users use these apps 6.56 times more often than the average user, followed by help and productivity apps in second place. Heavy users use applications in this group, which includes browsers and keyboard apps, as well as apps for task planning and word processing, 5.27 times more frequently than the average user. This is followed by games (used three times more frequently by heavy users), financial applications (used 2.55 times more frequently) and news and magazine apps (used twice as frequently).According to the study by Flurry Analytics, the sharp increase in the use of apps is a global phenomenon. The number of mobile devices worldwide recorded by Flurry with which people use apps has risen by 38% year-on-year from 1.3 billion to 1.8 billion.The figures were collected in the second quarter of 2015; the comparative period is the second quarter of 2014.