Mark Zuckerberg figured out a powerful rule about smartphone apps before everyone else — now we're seeing how important it is to Facebook’s business (FB, GOOG)

facebook ceo mark zuckerberg

Facebook's family of apps takes up almost a third of all time spent in apps worldwide, according to new data.
The stat illustrates just how deeply entrenched in our digital lives the Silicon Valley company has become in recent years.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists his company doesn't have a monopoly, but it clearly has unparalleled dominance of smartphones.

Testifying before US Congress in April, Mark Zuckerberg insisted to senators that Facebook wasn't a monopoly, arguing that "the average American uses eight different apps to communicate with their friends."

Even so, Facebook and its family of apps take up an astonishing amount of the time people spend on their smartphones.

According to new data from app-analysis firm Apptopia seen by Business Insider, time spent in Facebook's apps make up almost a third of the all the time people spend on the 100 most popular apps across Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile operating systems.

In other words, of every 100 minutes spent in the world's most popular apps, 32 of those are gobbled up by Facebook — whether that's in Facebook itself, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, or its other apps.

The data highlights how deeply Facebook has entrenched itself into people's digital lives, and the extent to which it has managed to dominate the mobile landscape, despite not building core platforms like Apple and Google.

Facebook even outstrips Google, according to Apptopia's data. Time spent in Google's apps — including YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps — takes up 22% of the time spent in the top 100 apps across iOS and Android.

When the scope is widened to encompass the top 500 most popular apps, Facebook's and Google's share drops slightly, though they still take up an extraordinarily large amount of time, 20% and 14%, respectively.

Overall, between the start of May and the end of July, users spent a cumulative 300 billion hours on Facebook's apps, and 118 billion in Google's.

The top 10 apps, in terms of time spent, are, in order:

WhatsApp
WeChat
Facebook
Messenger
Pandora
YouTube
Instagram
Twitter
Google Maps
Spotify

The data is worldwide, though it excludes third-party app stores, including in China (where Google's first-party app store, Google Play, is not available). "We combine session data from both the app side and consumer side for our learning set, which our data science team then creates estimation models with," AppTopia communications lead Adam Blacker said in an email.

"From the app side, more than 250,000 mobile app developer accounts are connected to Apptopia. From the consumer side, our SDK partner provides us with panel data from hundreds of millions of devices."

The findings also highlight the success of Facebook's aggressive acquisition and spin-out strategy. Over the past few years, it has snapped up potential competitors and up-and-coming startups left, right, and center, while also spinning out core Facebook functions (Messenger, Local) into standalone apps.

Instagram, which it bought for a relatively paltry $1 billion in 2012, is now worth an estimated $100 billion and has a whopping 1 billion monthly active users. WhatsApp, which it picked up for a more substantial $19 billion, in 2014, took up 85 billion hours of users' time alone in the three-month period measured by Apptopia.

Asked outright if he thought he had a monopoly at the Senate hearing, Zuckerberg responded to laughter that "it certainly doesn’t feel like that to me." But regardless of whether Facebook's dominance technically qualifies as one, it clearly now owns an unprecedented mindshare of the worldwide app market.

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