From MMD, with some labels translated from Japanese
As we pointed out yesterday, 2012 was a pretty big year for NHN Japan’s Line chat app. But if you need further evidence of its popularity, MMD Laboratory has conducted a 2012 smartphone insights survey, and the results tell us a lot about how Japanese users are jumping on board the chat app bandwagon.
When 670 participants between the ages of 20 and 59 were asked about which application they use the most, Line was the most popular response at 16.2 percent. Facebook also fared well at 12.6 percent. Twitter was a distant third at 4.6 percent. GREE, Mixi, and Mobage took roughly a percentage point each as you can see in the chart above.
Looking at Japanese users’ preferred genres, you can really see a distinct change between this most recent survey and MMD’s previous one back in July. As you can see in the chart below, the amount of respondents who say they regularly use free voice calls or chat apps (like Line) has jumped from 28.4 percent to 40.0 percent. Usage for other genres has remained more or less the same among the most popular genres. I wouldn’t be surprised if this apparent trend is even more visible if younger smartphone users under the age of 20 had been included.
If you’d like to read more info about this survey in English, the What Japan Thinks blog has a great overview which I encourage you to check out in its entirety for more great info from this poll.
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