TechCrunch reports on time spent in mobile apps. Saying users spend X time on these kinds of apps sounds like the best way to gauge engagement, but caution advised. This is a useful figure for apps like Facebook, whose revenue is closely tied to how many eyeball-seconds are spent in the app. But as others have pointed out, it’s flawed.

Consider the following app categories:

  • E-Commerce - as the above tweet mentions, a staggering amount can be spent with a few taps. Uber’s whole magic is precisely how effectively it gets out of the way.
  • Notifiers - how about getting recommendations from FourSquare when you walk past it, or seeing when your friend is nearby. Apps can be valuable even if they are mostly about poking you when something happens.
  • Audio - Few people outside of stock photo models specifically sit down to listen to music and podcasts. Audio apps are fundamentally about multitasking, which means users will do some basic management, hit play, and get out of the way. Whether they leave the app in the foreground or background is fairly arbitrary, so as long as these metrics are measuring eyes and not ears, it’s skewed.