The first report from Nielsen based on data from on-device meters on thousands of US Android smartphones shows some interesting differences in app ranking between men and women.

Nielsen's focus on Android is explained by the fact that it is now the most popular smartphone in the US with a 40% share of the market, according to a previous research report:

Android is also increasingly popular in Europe where it recently overtook Apple in terms of share and now ranks second behind Symbian, which is losing its audience as Android's increases, as indicated by Comscore's recent figures.

Now Nielsen has provided the first set of findings of the relative popularity of Android apps based on direct audience measurement data. To determine each apps "active reach," i.e. the percentage of Android owners who used an app within the past 30 days, Nielsen analyzed the data from on-device meters on thousands of Android smartphones.

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Not surprisingly the Android Market app itself was top of the list but what does come as an eye opener is how many users accessed it; over 90% of Android users aged 18 years and older in the US had visited it in the month. After Google Maps was the most used app overall (75%) and was used more by men (77%) than by women (72%). Among women Facebook was in second place (81%) but as it was only visited by 67% of men it was in 4th place overall. Gmail came in third place in both the male and female list the overall list and search which was used almost equally by men (72%) and women (71%) was fifth in the overall list. You Tube at 52% overall came in sixth in all lists.

After that not only is there a big step in the percentages but the differences between men and women become more marked. In the chart below pink lines show where an app was more popular with women and blue lines where an app was more popular with men. The steeper the line the greater the disparity.

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It is possible to discern some interesting male/female differences from the above chart. Social contact via Facebook, Twitter and the social word game Words with Friends seems to be a more "girly" preoccupation. But notice that Google+ (which scraped into the Top 20 in 20th place) is being used more more by men (15%) than by women (7%).

Kindle was bottom of the male list (10%) but more used by women (15%) while men relied more on Adobe Reader than women (15% compared to 12%). Men were also heavier users of Quickoffice Pro than women (27% compared to 23%) while it was women who made more use of Advanced Task Killer - the app for deleting unwanted stuff and keeping things tidy (28% compared to 24%).

Some of the gender similarities are also striking - Angry Birds, Pandora Radio and the Weather channel are in equivalent positions and Barcode Scanner and AngryBirds Rio come next to each other in both lists. So perhaps the male female divide isn't as marked as we thought.

More information

Nielsen Wire

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