India sees highest rise in time spent on mobile in COVID times: Comscore

Mobile continues to represent a majority of the time spent online, which has impacted the way consumers watch videos, order food, and make payments. The 2020 landscape has seen major changes, including accelerated trends due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and an increased focus on consumer privacy choices.

Comscore’s 2020 “Global State of Mobile” presentation provides in-depth mobile insights on the global market, including an update on how mobile trends around the world have impacted various categories. The report deep dives into mobile behaviours in the US, including how consumers interact with mobile video, mobile payments, and mobile ordering. It also examines how privacy-focused changes will impact media and advertising on mobile, and how measurement will evolve to meet privacy expectations.

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As per the report, India has registered the highest rise (96%) in time spent on mobile – mobile minutes as a percentage of total digital minutes in August 2020, compared to August 2019. And of time spent on mobile, apps drive majority of minutes, with India seeing 92%.

Certain app categories worldwide skew toward mobile-only usage, while others see more desktop usage. In early 2020, COVID-19 impacts were seen across out-of-home and travel related categories. However, a rebound is seen to those impacted categories after peak COVID-19 shutdowns in April 2020.

A new category of apps has emerged, pushing adoption of COVID-tracing apps around the world, including the Aarogya Setu app in India, which saw a high of almost 30% reach in April 2020 and hovered around a little under 15% reach in September 2020. Social/ collaboration mobile apps are seeing sustained boosts from worldwide pandemic restrictions, with Zoom seeing a steep jump (+2,393%) between February 2020 and March 2020, when lockdowns were imposed in most parts of the world. Google Meet’s growth has been even more dramatic at +25,959%.

With people confined to their homes, time spent in social platforms jumped in 2020, as people replaced offline interaction with online chill sessions on mobile. At 51%, Skype saw the highest YOY per cent change in total minutes, followed by Whatsapp (40%), Twitter (21%), Facebook Messenger (18%) and Reddit (16%).

Video consumption continues to grow, with mobile video remaining comparable to OTT. Mobile video consumption continues to provide comparable time spent consuming digital video as OTT. Users in the 25-54 age group consume almost two-thirds of the total mobile video.