Research analytics form Flurry now detects about 1 billion smartphones and tablets every month across the world and in the latest user behaviour report it reported few interesting statistics vital for developers to analyse their audience by platform and categories. There were 5 essential categories detected by Flurry’s system that comprise of 200 devices that drive in 80% of usage which include
1. Small phones (e.g., most Blackberries), 3.5” or under screens
2. Medium phones (e.g., iPhone), between 3.5” – 4.9” screens
3. Phablets (e.g., Galaxy Note), 5.0” – 6.9” screens
4. Small Tablets (e.g., Kindle Fire), 7.0” – 8.4” screens
5. Full-size tablets (e.g., the iPad), 8.5” or greater screens
The 16% of small phone users currently don’t really translate well into active users or generate more session, primarily because of low usability factors and app compatibility issues but on a contrasting end we have large screen tablets going the other way round. Tablets account for very good amount of conversion into active users and sessions generated, a mere 7% of large screen tablets like iPad generate almost 13% of active users and sessions. Medium size phones like iPhone again show a strong potential.
A key note here is again the so called large screen phones cum small screen tablets called phablets, they hard comprise of any active user base showing the low potential for developers to create content. This might be because of temporary market dynamic shift amongst a niche group of users that might soon fade away. Taking specific amount of pain in making sure that an app works on these phablets is not worth the effort currently.
Tablets, with their large screen are mostly expected to be good companions for web browsing, reading ebooks etc. but surprisingly results show that tablets are mostly used for gaming rather than other activity.
