How much does India love messaging apps? Not as much as you’d think.

Photo credit: DigitalDeconstruction .

Last year, a report came out saying Android users in India spend 47 percent of their time on smartphones on communication apps. Considering the average Indian smartphone user spends 169 minutes a day on his or her phone, that’s a good amount of time.

Messaging features are a key part of several apps within India, as the country’s relatively low internet bandwidth makes messaging a data-conserving solution to get things done over smartphones that have trouble accessing anything over 2G. Whatsapp has over 70 million active users in the country. Along with Facebook, it tops the list of India’s most downloaded apps. Whatsapp is also the preferred messaging app for 98 percent of Indian Android users.

Maybe that conjures up a certain image – a group of people, heads down, screens up, constantly and furiously typing. But is India really as enthusiastic about messaging as those numbers make it seem? According to a SimilarWeb study, maybe not.

SimilarWeb compared the amount of time spent on 10 mobile messaging apps by Android users in 11 major mobile markets. India spent the second least amount of time on messaging apps in the first quarter of this year, averaging 16 minutes, 12 seconds per day.

The two most time-consuming apps were Kakao and Whatsapp, averaging 38 minutes, 5 seconds and 38 minutes a day respectively.

Users in the Philippines averaged the least amount of time with 14 minutes, 3 seconds, while US users averaged the most time with 23 minutes, 23 seconds. Smartphone users in Brazil averaged the most amount of time on Whatsapp, averaging 60 minutes, 1 second per day.

Decoding time

Photo credit: Swaminathan.

So, what do these numbers mean? For one, they only take usage time into account, not user numbers. For example, Kakao users spend more time messaging on the app than other messaging app users in the US, which at first glance makes it look like the US is crazy for Kakao. But the app is installed on less than 1 percent of US Androids. That may also contribute to why Kakao’s minutes nearly tie Whatsapp’s in India, while Whatsapp is the country’s most popular messaging app by far.

In the meantime, that image of a country full of furious texters? Perhaps true but for a much smaller portion of their days.