Survey yields surprising insights into smartphone use in Japan

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Japanese software development company Just sytems has conducted a survey of 1,100 respondents ages 15 to 69 about about their usage of mobile and social media. The survey used the company’s product Fastask, an online survey and questionnaire platform that works similar to Survey Monkey.

The same survey was conducted back in July of 2012, the number of smartphone users exceeded the number of feature phone users by only a little: 48% to 47.7%. Smartphone usage is more common for people in their teens, 20s, and 30s, with a surprising 75% of kids ages 10 to 20 carrying smartphones. People in their 20s owning smartphones about 70%, and 30s at roughly 61%.

When asked about which mobile apps that they use most frequently in a given day, the app with the most usage time was Yahoo Japan, at about 24 minutes per day. Both male and females in their teens and 20s used social apps like Line, Facebook, and Twitter about 80 minutes per day. Teen girls use these apps more heavily than other segments, led by Line at 38 minutes, Twitter for 37 minutes, and Facebook for eight minutes per day.

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Docomo smartphone launch, 2012

Respondents were also asked about the App Store’s price hike in October. Almost 60% of iPhone users were aware of it, and 54% noted that they are considering cutting back on the purchase of paid apps. On a related topic, the survey also found that almost 53% of iPhone users use some sort of paid app for managing their schedule, in contrast to 41% of Android users.

The fact that this survey was conducted solely online may mean that the results skewed more towards tech-savvy smarphone users. But even so, the survey gives us a decent rough idea of the state of smartphone usage in this country. The entire report can be found over on the Fastask website.