Bored and Brilliant Apple Users, Don’t Be Smug

Originally published February 2, 2015

Part of the Bored and Brilliant project is to put some hard numbers to what is normally just a vague impression we scrutinize too closely: our phone habits. Gathering the data though is an imperfect science. The usage numbers we're getting for Android devices are significantly different from iPhone numbers. That's our first interesting finding. 

Here's how it works: We're partnering with two apps, one for iPhone and one for Android. Thousands of participants have opted in to share their usage numbers with us through those apps. (The data get aggregated before we see it by the way.) During a 7-day period starting January 26th, the daily average of the total group was just about 120 minutes of phone use per day. 

Apple users, you might be breathing a sigh of relief. Android users, you’re starting to fret.

But wait.

We’ve noticed that the average minutes for folks using Android versus Apple varied considerably each day last week. Android users consistently averaged around 150 minutes, and Apple users logged in around 100 minutes, according to the apps, Moment for iPhone and BreakFree for Android. 

Are Android users just indulging almost an extra hour every day? We doubt it.

BreakFree and Moment both try to accurately keep track of your device use and screen opens. But they do this using different code on different operating systems that allow different permissions to time-tracking apps. We're looking into why exactly they differ so much. And trying to sort out what the correct numbers should be. We can’t say for sure just yet. B&B participants, some of you are app developers, maybe you know? Share your wisdom in the comments section.

In the meantime, here’s a stat to contend with — both Android and Apple users averaged around 45 screen opens per day last week. So that seems to be counted the same in both apps. For the subset of folks who said in our survey that they spend “just the right amount of time” on their phones — and on the whole were less stressed by their phones — they averaged 32 checks a day.