Characterizing Smartphone Usage: Diversity and End User Context

Mobile end user context has gained increasing attention in the mobile services industry. This article utilizes handset-based data, collected from 140 users, to examine smartphone usage in different place-related end user contexts. Smartphone usage is examined first on a high level by using smartphone usage session as a unit of analysis. Then the usage sessions are dismantled into application sessions for deeper analysis and application level study. According to the authors’ analysis, smartphone usage is highly diversified across users. For example, the daily smartphone usage time differs by orders of magnitude between users. They observed also that smartphones are used differently in different end user contexts. For example, some applications are clearly more context sensitive than others. The results imply that mobile services and applications need to adapt to user behavior in order to be personalized enough, and that context awareness can indeed be a worthwhile step towards this.