Mobile app usage is shaped by near-universal phone ownership, long periods spent on mobile devices, and a small group of highly engaged apps. In the United States, 91% of adults owned a smartphone in 2025, while internet users spent an average of 3 hours and 46 minutes per day on mobile devices. Globally, browsers accounted for less than 6% of smartphone time, leaving most mobile attention to apps and other mobile experiences.
Contents
- Mobile reach and connectivity
- Smartphone ownership across groups
- How much time people spend on mobile
- App engagement and social platforms
- Mobile commerce and the App Store economy
- Health portals and practical app use
- What mobile traffic concentration shows
Mobile reach and connectivity
The U.S. had 411 million active cellular mobile connections in early 2025, equivalent to 119% of the population. The connection figure is higher than the number of people because individuals and organizations can maintain multiple active connections. During the same period, the country had 322 million internet users, and online penetration stood at 93.1%.
DataReportal’s Digital 2025 United States counted 253 million social media user identities in January 2025. Those identities represented 73.0% of the U.S. population. The country’s population was 346 million in January 2025, up by 1.9 million people, or 0.5%, year over year between early 2024 and early 2025.
The surrounding population profile helps put app reach into context. In early 2025, 83.6% of the U.S. population lived in urban centers and 16.4% lived in rural areas. The population was 49.8% female and 50.2% male, with a median age of 38.5. These are population characteristics, not app-user shares, but they describe the market in which mobile services operate.
Mobile connectivity also improved in speed. The median U.S. mobile internet download speed was 123.63 Mbps in January 2025, an increase of 17.35 Mbps, or 16.3%, over the previous 12 months. Faster connections can support richer video, audio, social, retail, and productivity experiences, although the supplied figures do not quantify how much of that speed translated into additional app time.
Smartphone ownership across groups
Pew Research Center’s Mobile Fact Sheet reported that 98% of U.S. adults owned a cellphone in 2025, including 91% who owned a smartphone. The remaining gap between cellphone and smartphone ownership matters when interpreting app audience estimates: not every cellphone owner necessarily has access to smartphone applications.
Ownership was highest among younger adults and declined with age. The shares of U.S. adults who owned a smartphone in 2025 were:
| Adult group | Smartphone ownership |
|---|---|
| Ages 18–29 | 97% |
| Ages 30–49 | 96% |
| Ages 50–64 | 90% |
| Ages 65+ | 78% |
The same Pew Research Center data showed little difference by gender: smartphone ownership was 90% among U.S. men and 91% among U.S. women in 2025. Differences were wider by household income and education. Ownership was 82% among adults in households earning below $30,000, compared with 97% among those earning $100,000 or more. It was 84% among adults with a high school education or less and 96% among adults with a college degree.
Community type showed a smaller spread. Smartphone ownership reached 93% among suburban adults, compared with 91% among urban adults and 87% among rural adults in 2025. These figures describe access, not frequency of use or the number of apps installed.
How much time people spend on mobile
DataReportal’s Digital 2025 Global Overview reported that internet users in the United States spent an average of 3 hours and 46 minutes per day on mobile devices. U.S. adults spent an average of 6 hours and 38 minutes online per day across devices and online activities. The two measurements have different scopes, so they should not be added together.
Globally, web browsing occupied a small share of smartphone attention. DataReportal described browser and search-app use as roughly one-twentieth of smartphone time, or less than 6%. This does not mean people rarely use the web on phones; it means browser time was a minority of total smartphone time in the cited global measurement.
The mobile web still represented most web page requests. Mobile web page requests accounted for more than 63% of web page requests in December 2024. Global cellular data traffic assigned to web browsing was 2.09 exabytes per month. For the typical smartphone, web browsing consumed about 300 MB per month out of an average monthly mobile data use of 21.6 GB.
These figures show why app usage statistics and mobile web statistics need separate definitions. A person can spend most smartphone time inside apps while still generating a majority of web page requests from a mobile device. Time, requests, and data volume measure different behaviors.
App engagement and social platforms
The supplied global app measurements point to concentrated engagement. Facebook’s mobile app had 2.3 billion monthly users in the latest data.ai intelligence cited by DataReportal’s Digital 2025 Global Overview. That is a monthly-user estimate for the cited dataset, not a count of unique people across every mobile platform.
TikTok’s Android engagement was reported with several different measures for November 2024. The typical TikTok Android user spent almost 35 hours using the app during the month, opened it 360 times, and had a typical session length of 5 minutes and 49 seconds. The opening count and session duration show repeated, short visits rather than one continuous monthly session.
The U.S. TikTok figures in the cited dataset were higher on a monthly time basis. U.S. TikTok users spent almost 44 hours per month in the app and opened it about nine times each day. DataReportal presented these as app-use figures for the cited data set; they should not be treated as a universal average for every country, operating system, or age group.
The relationship between monthly time, openings, and session length is useful for reading app statistics. A platform can have a large monthly audience without every user spending many hours in it, while a highly frequent app can generate substantial attention from repeated short sessions. The supplied data supports both ideas but does not provide a complete ranking of all mobile apps.
Mobile commerce and the App Store economy
Apple’s Global App Store and Its Growth 2025 report said the App Store ecosystem facilitated nearly $1.3 trillion in billings and sales worldwide in 2024. Apple reported an average of 813 million weekly App Store visitors worldwide during that year.
The reported total covered more than digital app purchases. Apple attributed $131 billion, or 10%, to digital goods and services. Physical goods and services accounted for $1,014 billion, or 78%, while in-app advertising contributed $150 billion, or 12%. These categories describe billings and sales facilitated by the App Store ecosystem, not necessarily money paid only for app downloads or subscriptions.
| App Store-facilitated category, 2024 | Worldwide amount | Share of total |
|---|---|---|
| Digital goods and services | $131 billion | 10% |
| Physical goods and services | $1,014 billion | 78% |
| In-app advertising | $150 billion | 12% |
Within the physical-goods-and-services category, general retail contributed $618 billion to 2024 m-commerce activity worldwide and represented 48% of that category. Travel contributed $135 billion, food delivery and pickup contributed $110 billion, and grocery contributed $80 billion.
Apple said the ecosystem had more than doubled from $514 billion in 2019 to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2024. It also said billings and sales facilitated by the App Store at least doubled in the United States, China, and Europe over the five-year period. Those are Apple’s reported comparisons across the period, and the figures are not independent estimates in the supplied material.
Apple further said it collected no commission on more than 90% of the $1.3 trillion in billings and sales facilitated globally in 2024. The statement concerns the portion on which Apple said it collected no commission; it does not change the reported total of ecosystem-facilitated activity.
Health portals and practical app use
Mobile apps are also used for practical access to services. ONC Health IT Research and Analysis reported that 77% of individuals were offered online access to their medical records in 2024, and 65% were offered access and used it. In the same year, 57% used an app to access medical records, while 42% used web-only access.
Portal-app use increased over time in the ONC figures. The share using a portal app to access medical records was 51% in 2024, up from 38% in 2020. The dataset reports both a broad app-access measure of 57% and the portal-app trend measure of 51%; these should be retained as separate measures because their labels and comparison periods differ.
Access was higher among people with some health needs. Among individuals with a chronic condition, 81% were offered online medical-record access and 69% accessed their records in 2024. Among individuals with a recent cancer diagnosis, 86% were offered access and 76% accessed their records.
Provider encouragement was strongly associated with portal use in the same report. Of individuals offered a patient portal, 89% were encouraged by their health care provider to use it, and 87% of those encouraged accessed their portal. The figures indicate the importance of onboarding and prompting, but they do not establish that encouragement alone caused access.
People often had several portals. In 2024, 59% had multiple online medical records or patient portals, up from 50% in 2022. Forty percent had a portal with other health care providers, up from 32% in 2022. Thirty percent had a portal with an insurer, 29% with a clinical laboratory, 24% with a pharmacy, and 22% with a hospital. Fifteen percent had no portal in 2024, down from 22% in 2022.
What mobile traffic concentration shows
Ericsson’s Mobility Report found that on sampled networks, subscribers using more than 20 GB per month were only about 10% of subscribers but generated 65% of total mobile traffic. This is a clear concentration pattern: a relatively small heavy-use group accounted for most sampled traffic.
The Ericsson report also described changes in traffic composition between 2020 and 2024. Cloud storage, video, and audio traffic types saw the largest share increases, while file sharing and web browsing saw the most significant declines in share. The statement describes changes in traffic share, not necessarily an absolute decline in the number of web-browsing bytes.
Taken together, the available figures describe mobile app usage as broad in reach but uneven in intensity. Smartphone ownership was 91% among U.S. adults in 2025, yet heavy data usage was concentrated among roughly 10% of subscribers on the sampled Ericsson networks. Global smartphone time favored apps over browsers, while mobile commerce and health portals show that app use extends beyond social entertainment into purchasing and essential services.