Do smartphone application preferences change over time or vary by demographics? A longitudinal study using behavioral data

Smartphones afford users the ability to select their own custom mobile application repertoires through the installation of a nearly endless array of applications. Acknowledging the need for increased attention to the description of digital media usage, this paper reports a quantitative descriptive study that investigates the types of applications that people commonly use, the amount of time they spend with these applications, the application combinations that they construct, the consistency of these combinations over time, and differences in these outcomes by three demographic characteristics. Using a longitudinal dataset that includes behavioural data collected via data donations, the study identifies key application adoption patterns and shows that peoples’ mobile application repertoires are concentrated around a subset of popular applications that is relatively consistent over time. However, within this subset there is substantial diversity between applications and between individuals. These results suggest that quantifying smartphone usage with a single metric—total aggregate usage duration (i.e., screentime)—is unlikely to capture the full extent and diversity of media that users curate for themselves as part of their mobile application repertoires.