Exploratory analysis of mobile app usage in relation to distance from home

Abstract

We present a first exploratory analysis of app usage collected from 38 participants with the tappigraphy approach. In addition to collecting tapping data of our participants, we registered the GPS locations during their phone sessions. Our analysis entails the density estimation of smartphone session usage and the inspection of potential effects of distance from the home location on participants' number of taps in apps, differences in the number of taps on map and other apps, and finally on time spent on map apps. We found different behavioural patterns of mobile app usage on an individual level. However, overall, there are no significant differences in tap density across map and other app categories over the distance from home. Nonetheless, we argue that these preliminary results are crucial to investigate app usage behaviour on smartphones further and put a solid basis on the validation of tappigraphy as a method in the field of LBS and GIScience.