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A new pastime? Americans log the most time on messaging apps

By Lulu Chang July 5, 2016

us messaging apps whats app im instant — Panithan Fakseemuang/123rf

Baseball may commonly be referred to as America’s pastime, but there’s something else we as a nation seem particularly fond of — messaging apps. According to a new study from digital market intelligence firm SimilarWeb, U.S. smartphone users spend the longest time using messaging apps when compared to their counterparts in other smartphone-obsessed countries, including the U.K., Brazil, France, Germany, India, and Japan.

While it’s not a whole lot of time in the context of the entire day, an average of 23 minutes and 23 seconds spent daily on messaging apps remains quite significant. In conducting its study, SimilarWeb looked at the daily use of the 10 most commonly installed messaging apps on Android devices across 11 countries, including Messenger, Skype, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Viber, Kik, Snapchat, Line, Kakao, and WeChat.

Americans are the biggest daily users of six out of the top 10 most popular messaging apps, namely Snapchat, Hangouts, Viber, Kik, WeChat and Kakao (surprisingly, not of Messenger, which is most popular in the Philippines, where users average 14 minutes, 28 seconds on the app every day). But when it comes to Snapchat, we just can’t get enough. For an app that is all about ephemeral content, Americans are spending plenty of time using it on a daily basis — 18 minutes and 43 seconds, on average, to be exact. This figure is actually double the daily use of Messenger in the U.S. (9 minutes, 22 seconds).

But when it comes to the app we spend the most time on, it’s actually South Korea-based Kakao, which claims an average of 48 minutes and 37 seconds of usage every day.

Brazilians are also active users of messaging apps, and, in fact, spend over an hour a day on WhatsApp, representing the single greatest chunk of time from any country on any messaging app. WhatsApp certainly reigns supreme in the messaging space, claiming dominance in 109 countries and far outstripping its nearest competitor, Messenger (both live under the Facebook umbrella).

In Japan, Line and Skype are the messaging apps of choice, with users spending 19 minutes and 16 minutes, 34 seconds, respectively, on the chat platforms.

To check out more about just how much time we’re spending chatting up a storm, you can find the full report here.

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