Apple smartphones and tablets consume more data than their Android counterparts.
The Citrix ByteMobile Mobile Analytics Report for the first quarter of 2013, released in conjunction with a consumer survey, found a connected tablet generated three times more data than a smartphone.
Of the tablets, iOS tablets consumed the most data, generating more than three times the data of an Android tablet at 33 MBs per day.
And iOS smartphones consumed more data than their Android counterparts as well; where Android smartphones generated 5MB of data per day, or roughly 160 MBs per month, iOS smartphones generated 13 MBs per day, the report said.
Android users loves them some apps
However, app-store wise, Android users generated one and a half times more app store specific data than iOS users and put a greater load on the wireless network per subscriber, with iTunes tallying 5.3MB per subscriber compared with Android App Store’s 7.5 MB per subscriber, the report found.
Of these apps, 39% of subscribers using health applications used a fitness app, generating the most traffic around 6pm and using 50% of the total mobile health related data traffic on wireless networks.
Forty seven percent of total subscribers using health apps used a pregnancy-related application (hopefully not ‘Foetus’s First Facebook’).
Hear ye, hear ye
The report said on any given day, out of every ten smartphone subscribers, six would look up information including news, weather, blogs and maps. However 62% of people who owned mobile devices in the noughties were more likely to look up social media updates than news first thing in the morning.
Four would open a browser window and use a social networking app, three would use e-commerce, Facebook and encounter a mobile advertisement, two would visit the App Store and view video content and one would use iTunes, YouTube or Twitter.
The top mobile game was Words With Friends, played by four out of every ten smartphone subscribers on any given day, followed unsurprisingly by Temple Run (played by two of every ten), then Angry Birds, Bejeweled and good ol’ Solitaire.
Fifty four percent of mobile device owners in the noughties admitted to cheating when playing games with others, Citrix said.
Google reigns supreme..for ads
The report found the top four ad networks by both subscriber reach and total data volume, were owned by Google.
On average, 38% of users encountered mobile ads from Google, making up more than half of total data volume generated by ads.
However ads used 1% of total monthly data traffic generated by a smartphone subscriber, on average.
Video generated more than half of total data traffic on wireless networks, but only two out of ten mobile subscribers watched video on average.
Of mobile owners who had recorded an embarrassing video of someone in 2012, 52% were saving it to share with others in 2013.
Death to slow load times
In Europe, 51% of web pages downloaded in eight seconds or less across wireless networks. Thirty nine percent downloaded in 20 seconds or less and 10% downloaded in 20 seconds or more.
In total, 50% of web pages took more than eight seconds to load, 30% of mobile owners gave up in eight seconds or less, and 72% gave up when attempting to download large files because of slow download speeds, the report said.
Methodology
The findings in the report come from Citrix’s Smart Capacity Mobile Analytics, a mobile data traffic reporting tool, which anonymously sources data traffic stats from 3G and 4G networks of Citrix ByteMobile’s global, tier-one customer base of more than 130 global mobile operators.
The online consumer survey was conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Citric and was distributed among 1000 US adult smartphone or tablet owners aged 18 or older, between January 8th and January 15th.
