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Mobile Dominates Digital Minutes Across Global Markets

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Mobile devices account for more than 60 percent of all digital minutes in all 9 markets profiled in comScore's report: Mobile’s Hierarchy of Needs.

The report published in March 2017 traces the global evolution of smartphones and tablets to become the primary digital tool, revealing specific behaviors for which these platforms have become important to consumers’ daily lives. The report uses mobile and multi-platform data from 9 international markets: USA, Canada, UK, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, China and Indonesia.

The report states: "The concept of 'mobile first' is no longer exclusive to technology-focused businesses and consumers, and is the default position for a growing number of internet users, who now spend the majority of their digital time on smartphones and tablets."

Other key insights revealed in the report include:

■ Apps dominate time spent on smartphone and tablet devices, representing more than 80% of mobile minutes in all markets studied.

■ The share of consumers abandoning desktop altogether varies dramatically by geography – from just 7% in the UK, to 70% in Indonesia. Mobile only audiences comprise users from all age demographics surprisingly evenly.

■ Social Media behaviors have shifted towards content. In Spain, sharing of links to websites grew 11% in 2016, compared to a -3% fall in posting personal statuses.

■ Mobile convenience has meant that audiences for high-value categories such as banking and travel have overcome security concerns to overtake desktop in many markets.

■ Top apps are dominated by large international players, but regional differences have an impact. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ Instant Messenger and Line account for nearly 1 in 7 minutes for some non-US markets, and led to a decline in standard SMS messaging.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Mobile Dominates Digital Minutes Across Global Markets

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Mobile devices account for more than 60 percent of all digital minutes in all 9 markets profiled in comScore's report: Mobile’s Hierarchy of Needs.

The report published in March 2017 traces the global evolution of smartphones and tablets to become the primary digital tool, revealing specific behaviors for which these platforms have become important to consumers’ daily lives. The report uses mobile and multi-platform data from 9 international markets: USA, Canada, UK, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, China and Indonesia.

The report states: "The concept of 'mobile first' is no longer exclusive to technology-focused businesses and consumers, and is the default position for a growing number of internet users, who now spend the majority of their digital time on smartphones and tablets."

Other key insights revealed in the report include:

■ Apps dominate time spent on smartphone and tablet devices, representing more than 80% of mobile minutes in all markets studied.

■ The share of consumers abandoning desktop altogether varies dramatically by geography – from just 7% in the UK, to 70% in Indonesia. Mobile only audiences comprise users from all age demographics surprisingly evenly.

■ Social Media behaviors have shifted towards content. In Spain, sharing of links to websites grew 11% in 2016, compared to a -3% fall in posting personal statuses.

■ Mobile convenience has meant that audiences for high-value categories such as banking and travel have overcome security concerns to overtake desktop in many markets.

■ Top apps are dominated by large international players, but regional differences have an impact. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ Instant Messenger and Line account for nearly 1 in 7 minutes for some non-US markets, and led to a decline in standard SMS messaging.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Across the enterprise technology landscape, a quiet crisis is playing out. Organizations have run hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generative AI pilots. Leadership has celebrated the proof of concept (POCs) ... Industry experience points to a sobering reality: only 5-10% of AI POCs that progress to the pilot stage successfully reach scaled production. The remaining 90% fail because the enterprise environment around them was never ready to absorb them, not the AI models ...

Today's modern systems are not what they once were. Organizations now rely on distributed systems, event-driven workflows, hybrid and multi-cloud environments and continuous delivery pipelines. While each adds flexibility, it also introduces new, often invisible failures. Development speed is no longer the primary bottleneck of innovation. Reliability is ...

Seeing is believing, or in this case, seeing is understanding, according to New Relic's 2025 Observability Forecast for Retail and eCommerce report. Retailers who want to provide exceptional customer experiences while improving IT operations efficiency are leaning on observability ... Here are five key takeaways from the report ...

Technology leaders across the federal landscape are facing, and will continue to face, an uphill battle when it comes to fortifying their digital environments against hostile and persistent threat actors. On one hand, they are being asked to push digital transformation ... On the other hand, they are facing the fiscal uncertainty of continuing resolutions (CR) and government shutdowns looming near and far. In the face of these challenges, CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs must figure out how to modernize legacy systems and infrastructure while doing more with less and still defending against external and internal threats ...

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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