musicMagpie Blog

We've published quite a lot of posts on smartphone addiction recently, including a quiz that'll tell you just how addicted to your phone you are (which you can take by clicking this link).

However, a recent study by American company Comcast suggests that most of us aren't quite as addicted to our smartphones as we think.

According to Comcast's study, the average smartphone user downloads precisely no new apps in an average month: literally no new apps whatsoever.

That accounts for two-thirds of smartphone users. Tellingly, 7% of smartphone users were responsible for nearly half of all app downloads.

While the study only took US smartphone owners into account, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that we follow a similar pattern in the UK. While most of us use apps every day, they're likely to be the same couple of apps: Facebook, Twitter, BBC News and so on.

So, what is going on? Are we all getting bored of our phones?

A quick look around any bus, train or town centre should give you the answer: no. We're still spending a lot of our time with our heads buried in our smartphones, and that is unlikely to change soon.

However, we have settled into certain patterns of usage that mean we're not getting as much value from our phones as we could be. Like our brains, most of us are only utilising 10% of our smartphone's potential.

It might not be our fault, though. There are hundreds of thousands of apps on the market, and searching through them to find something of us is a daunting prospect. Luckily, there are plenty of blogs "" including our own "" that recommend good apps, so it's not too hard to sort the useful from the pointless.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that people are just giving up on apps entirely (and possibly switching to dumb phones, as we wrote about in a previous post), although the fact that 71% of the UK's phone owners have a smartphone suggests otherwise.

So, are we getting bored of our phones? The evidence suggests not, although the novelty of apps seems to have worn off, and we seem to be settling into certain patterns and behaviours "" a sure sign the smartphone has become an essential part of our lives.

If you're not using your smartphone as much as you used to, why not see how much cash you could make for it with musicMagpie? You can sell everything from the latest iPhone to an old-school Nokia.