The popularity of Smartphones and tablets has greatly grown. According to Gartner, a leading information technology research and advisory company, the sale of Smartphones had surpassed the sale of traditional mobile phones.

According to the company, there were over 225 million units of Smarphones sold in the second quarter of 2013. This marks a 46% increase in sales from the last quarter.

Tablet usage is also on the rise. According to a Pew internet survey, over 34% of adults over the age of 18 own tablets. This is a great increase compared to tablet ownership last year where only 18% of adults had the devices.

It’s not only the sale of Smartphones and tablets that has skyrocketed; the amount of time that people spend on their gadgets has also increased.

According to a number of studies done on US citizens, mobile phone users are spending an average of 2 hrs and 42 minutes per day on their phones. This is a12 minute increase in the amount of time that people spend on their phones.

Mobile applications have been shown to be the ones that take most of the time of the average mobile phone user. According to the studies, the applications take up 86% f the consumer’s time. Unlike last year where most of the consumer’s time was spent on the web, most of the consumers are spending most of their time on the mobile apps.

Games took most of the consumer’s time where they took over 32% of the time. Social and messaging applications took the second place where they took 28% of the time. Mobile web shrank from 20% to 14%, entertainment and utility apps took 8%, while productivity apps took 4% of the consumer’s time.

When it comes to social media, Facebook and Google took most of the consumer’s time where they both accounted for over 25% of the time. The most amazing thing is that the top ten franchises accounted for less than 40% of the time spent.

This shows that there is great opportunity for other franchises to come up and take control of the market.

New apps such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, Waze, Spotify, and Pinterest received wide adoption and they took over 2% of the consumer’s time.

Since it has been shown that mobile phone users are preferring apps to mobile browsers, it’s expected that more great and engaging apps will be created in the coming years. It’s also expected that more franchises will come up.