Quantifying My Phone Usage – Android Applications Usage Statistics

Lighton Phiri

I came across an interesting article [1] not too long ago… they did this study where they found–in a survey of 2,000 people–that most under 25s check their mobile devices an average of 32 times a day. Now I am NO under 25, but I’ve been obsessing a lot about how often I do this myself. So I have been playing around with Android’s dumpsys, and with these daily statistics, I kind of have an idea of how frequently I use my device.

See I have this LG Optimus L5 (I KNOW, I should probably upgrade to something with more processing power :p) which I have loaded with tonnes of apps–81 at the time of this writing… See ‘adb shell pm’ output below.

Taking Stock of Packages

You will notice from the output below that I have a total of 157 packages installed on my device, 81 of which I explicitly installed–notice that I am filtering out apps that came loaded with the device (come.android.* and com.lge.*)

phiri@phiri-PROLINE-DH55TC:~$ adb shell pm list packages | wc -l
157
phiri@phiri-PROLINE-DH55TC:~$ 
phiri@phiri-PROLINE-DH55TC:~$ adb shell pm list packages | grep -wv 'com.android\|com.lge' | wc -l
81
phiri@phiri-PROLINE-DH55TC:~$

Computing Usage Statistics

I came across an interesting discussion [3] and one of the recommended solution for computing usage statistics was using the dialer code *#*#4636#*#*–see sample output below.  However, this method appears NOT to be persistent and statistics are reset once device is reboot.

Sample output of dialer command *#*#4636#*#*
Sample output of dialer command *#*#4636#*#*

And so I resorted to using Android’s ‘adb shell dumpsys’ command.

phiri@phiri-PROLINE-DH55TC:~$ adb shell service list
Found 64 services:
:
51      usagestats: [com.android.internal.app.IUsageStats]
:
phiri@phiri-PROLINE-DH55TC:~$ 
phiri@phiri-PROLINE-DH55TC:~$ adb shell dumpsys usagestats
Date: 20140815
  com.google.android.keep: 2 times, 283639 ms
    com.google.android.keep.activities.EditorActivity: 1 starts, 1500-2000ms=1
    com.google.android.keep.activities.BrowseActivity: 2 starts, >=5000ms=1
  android: 1 times, 7943 ms
    com.android.internal.app.ChooserActivity: 1 starts, 3000-4000ms=1
  com.lge.camera: 1 times, 60603 ms
    com.lge.camera.CameraApp: 2 starts, >=5000ms=1
    com.lge.camera.PostviewActivity: 1 starts, >=5000ms=1
  com.android.settings: 7 times, 355421 ms
    com.android.settings.Settings: 2 starts, 3000-4000ms=1
    com.android.settings.Settings$WifiSettingsDialogActivity: 3 starts, 3000-4000ms=1, >=5000ms=1
    com.android.settings.SubSettings: 2 starts, 250-500ms=1, 500-750ms=1
    com.android.settings.UsbSettings: 2 starts, 3000-4000ms=1
  bbc.mobile.news.ww: 6 times, 4653555 ms
    bbc.mobile.news.ww.HomeWwActivity: 6 starts, 3000-4000ms=1, >=5000ms=2
  com.whatsapp: 6 times, 3405392 ms
    com.whatsapp.Conversation: 9 starts, 500-750ms=1, 1000-1500ms=1, 1500-2000ms=2, 4000-5000ms=1, >=5000ms=4
    com.whatsapp.ContactInfo: 3 starts, 500-750ms=1
    com.whatsapp.Conversations: 8 starts, 1000-1500ms=1, >=5000ms=2
    com.whatsapp.ViewProfilePhoto: 1 starts, 0-250ms=1
    com.whatsapp.Main: 1 starts
    com.whatsapp.MediaView: 1 starts, 500-750ms=1
:
:
  com.lge.launcher2: 10 times, 1879797 ms
    com.lge.launcher2.Launcher: 10 starts, 3000-4000ms=1, >=5000ms=1
Date: history.xml (old data version)
phiri@phiri-PROLINE-DH55TC:~$

Parsing Through the Data

  • I used the basic Python script below to parse the output
  • For each day, I was only interested in the app statistics–the second level hierarchy.
  • I left out the application Activity statistics, however, these provide more insight into how I really use some apps… take come.whatsapp for instance: I launched the app 6 times, but started a total of 9 conversations, views contact information 3 times and viewed a profile photograph.
with open("lg_usage_20140818.txt") as f:
   for line in f:
      if line.startswith("Date: "):
         print '----------', line.strip(), '----------'
      elif "times" in line:
         print line.strip()

Results at a Glance

  • I cannot exactly quantify the total time I spend on my phone since I tend to have multiple apps open at any given instance and also tend to have apps running in the background
  • Based on five days worth of data, I THINK that I check my mobile device an average of 26 times per day ( At this point, I am guessing the ‘com.lg.launcher2’ package gives me the results I need…). Of course this includes data from a Saturday and a Sunday, two days when I rarely use my mobile device.
  • In a typical week, of the 157 apps I have loaded on my mobile device, I only use 34
  • In a typical week, of the 81 apps that I have explicitly downloaded and installed, I only use 22–I filtered out ‘com.android’ and ‘com.lg’ packages
  • On a typical week day (August 15, 2014 in this case), my Top 10 mostly used apps are in table below
[table “16” not found /]

Bibliography

[1] http://www.bbc.com/newsbeat/26780069
[2] https://source.android.com/devices/tech/input/dumpsys.html
[3] http://android.stackexchange.com/q/7593