Gen Z consumers spent 102% more time on mobile personal finance/trading apps during the COVID-19 pandemic than before the crisis hit, according to a pandemic app usage study from Global Wireless Solutions (GWS). This family of apps showed the greatest increase across all age groups at 63%.
The study, “The Pandemic Year in Mobile Apps,” found that consumers spent on average four hours per day using mobile apps. This was ten minutes more per day than before the pandemic hit.
The research compared the timeframe from March 2020 to February 2021 against the previous 12 months and evaluated usage of about 80,000 consumers across the United States.
The research found that social media app use increased by 25% – more than an hour per day – and was the way in which consumers spent the most time on their phones.
“When Coronavirus took hold, smartphones became further cemented as a link between isolated consumers and the world at large, thus their usage is increasingly becoming an accurate reflection of human behavior on the whole,” GWS Founder and CEO Dr. Paul Carter said in a press release. “We expect that sustained consumer mobile behavior changes will have a lasting effect on how consumers engage with businesses over the long term, and will be a major aspect to establishing what normal looks like now.”
Following are highlights from the pandemic app usage study:
- Use of food stamp management app Fresh EBT increased 152%.
- Time spent on TikTok increased 380%.
- Use of DoorDash increased 166% and Uber Eats increased 121%.
- Time spent on the Walmart app increased 74%, the Target app increased 62% and the Amazon shopping app increased 58%.
- Google Maps was down 17% and Uber and Lyft driver apps dropped by 40% among power users.
- From its May 2020 launch, time spent on HBO Max grew 513%, while total time spent on Disney+ grew 92%.