Research: Facebook synonymous with browsing on mobile

(Credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images) New research from mobile analytics firm Flurry suggests that Facebook is so powerful a force on mobile that the social network has become synonymous with browsing on smartphones and tablets.

Facebook accounts for 18 percent of U.S. consumers' total time spent on smart devices, a percent that translates to more than 28 minutes per day on average, according to Flurry, which measures application usage on more than 1 billion monthly active smart devices.

The firm, which used its data in conjunction with numbers from comScore and NetMarketShare, said that, on the whole, consumers spend an average of 2 hours and 38 minutes per day on smartphones and tablets, with 80 percent of time spent inside applications and 20 percent on the mobile web.

Facebook ranked second only to games -- the entire category and not a single app -- in terms of apps and services commanding the most attention. Games accounted for 32 percent of time spent per day. The social network, however, racked up more minutes per day than any single mobile phone browser, Flurry determined. The finding paints a picture of Facebook as standing in for the mobile b... [Read more]