Indians use more sports and racing game apps: Study

Indians, among six nations, use more sports and racing game smartphone applications, a study has showed.

The study, led by researchers from University College Cork in Ireland, found that English-speaking countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, along with Japan and South Korea had the highest app usage across the board. 

This is probably due to the fact that almost all apps have an English language version.

Conversely, non-English speaking countries such as Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan and India are with the lowest app usage, but are higher in sports and racing game apps, the researchers said.

Interestingly, while geography was found to play an important role in app usage, socio-economic factors also dictate mobile app usage.

"Masculine" cultures (with more pronounced gender roles) like Japan, prefer personalisation apps, while "collectivist" cultures and those with more fluid gender roles such as Russia seem to value family-related categories, education games, and parenting.

On the other hand, "individualist" cultures such as the US, favoured entertainment applications and other leisure-related categories such as travel, sports, health and fitness, and music and audio.

"The results of our work show that there is a strong relationship between the type of apps people use and their geographic and socio-economic factors, suggesting that these different factors should be taken into account when studying mobile data," said Ella Peltonen, from the varsity.

"In addition, our results can be used to better target mobile apps in different countries, and for personalisation," she added.

The results were presented at the ACM MobileHCI 2018 in Spain.

For the study, the team carried out a large-scale analysis of geographic, cultural, and demographic factors in mobile usage. They examined data of 25,323 android users who used 54,776 mobile applications in 44 countries across Europe, Americas, Asia and Oceania.