A look at the demographics of “mobile addicts” who launch apps over 60 times per day
The Rise of the Mobile Addict — In May of 2013, KPCB's Partner and world-renowned analyst Mary Meeker shared her latest Internet Trends Report. In that report, Ms. Meeker shared an interesting stat …
Context & Ripple Effects
This Flurry analysis puts hard numbers on a segment Mary Meeker flagged in her confirmed May 2013 KPCB Internet Trends Report: users who launch apps more than 60 times a day. It lands four months after Flurry reported that mobile use grew 115% in 2013, propelled by messaging apps — so the "addict" cohort reads as the leading edge of that broader acceleration.
The piece also extends a thread Flurry has been pulling since 2011, when it argued mobile ad inventory could eat internet display ad spend, and its December 2012 finding that app time was starting to challenge television. Defining a high-frequency user demographic gives advertisers and media planners a named target rather than just an aggregate time-spent figure.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and their media buyers gain a newly quantified, high-engagement audience segment — 60-plus daily app launches — that Flurry's SDK data lets them target directly inside apps.
- Flurry strengthens its position as the de facto measurement standard for mobile engagement, converting raw SDK telemetry into publishable audience taxonomies that press outlets like Business Insider amplify.
Second-order effects
- App publishers, especially messaging and social categories that drove the 115% usage growth Flurry measured for 2013, face pressure to design for habitual daily opens because frequency — not installs — becomes the metric advertisers pay against.
- Competing analytics and ad platforms must match this segmentation or cede the narrative about mobile audiences to Flurry, pushing engagement benchmarks like launches-per-day into standard campaign reporting.
Third-order effects
- If heavy-use cohorts keep expanding, mobile advertising economics shift decisively toward in-app inventory and away from desktop display — the trajectory Flurry sketched back in 2011 when it sized app inventory against internet display budgets.
- Engagement frequency risks becoming a core input for how apps are valued and funded, echoing Meeker's long-running role in framing internet trends for investors since her Web 2.0 presentations.
The trend: Mobile engagement is maturing from broad adoption into habitual heavy use, with analytics firms like Flurry segmenting audiences by launch frequency to steer where ad dollars flow.