Messaging most popular online activity for Indian consumers: Survey

Messaging has emerged as the most popular online activity for Indian consumers, with a latest survey revealing that mobile users spend over 30 minutes on average daily on messaging applications.

"Over 90 per cent of the consumers use some kind of messaging application regularly to stay in touch with friends and family," said the report by Consumer Education and Research Centre, a not-for-profit consumer outfit, in partnership with Chase India, a public policy consultancy firm.

The report 'Understanding consumer choice towards mobile applications' is based on a consumer survey, conducted by Nielsen, to understand the app preference of Indian consumers and the reasons driving such preferences.

"Messaging has emerged as the most popular online activity, with users spending over 30 minutes on average every day on messaging applications...Other popular activities include video streaming, music streaming, social networking and browsing the internet," the report said.

Consumers exercise informed choice when selecting the mobile application, the report said, adding that the Indian users frequently end up downloading competing apps.

"Consumers often use multiple applications for the same activity leading to significant degree of overlap in categories like browsers (50 per cent), online retail (42 per cent), messaging (48 per cent) and cab aggregators (28 per cent)," it said.

Elaborating on the overlap between popular messaging apps, it said while almost 50 per cent of consumers used both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, about 20 per cent used both WhatsApp and Hike.

The report revealed a high awareness and usage of third-party apps among mobile users.

"Consumers download these apps from different app stores, web or even sideload them. 86 per cent users stated that peer reviews and word of mouth are key influencers for choosing an application," it said.

The "openness of the Android ecosystem" has spurred an extensive and competitive mobile app ecosystem that provides a plenty of choices for the Indian consumers, it noted.

The primary research for the survey involved collation and analysis of data from Neilsen's smartphone panel of 8,000 connected phone users as well as interviews of 3,776 urban and rural respondents, a statement by Consumer Education and Research Centre and Chase India said.