How consistent are smartphone application preferences? A descriptive study of mobile application repertoires using behavioral data

Smartphones afford users the ability to select their own mobile application repertoires through the installation of various applications. We report a quantitative descriptive study of 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 the differences in these outcomes by demographic characteristics. Using a longitudinal dataset collected from a U.S. adult sample during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study leverages behavioral data collected via data donations to identify key application adoption patterns and shows that peoples’ mobile application repertoires are concentrated around a set of popular applications that is relatively consistent over time. However, within this set there is considerable diversity between individuals and applications, suggesting that quantifying smartphone usage with a single metric— ‘screentime’ —is unlikely to capture the full extent of media that users engage with.