Time-waster smartphone: Are you above or below the cut?
Germans are spending more and more time on their smartphones. This is due, among other things, to the fact that cell phones are combining more and more functions in one device. Analyzing your own screen time can therefore be helpful. But: Are you above or below the average usage time?
Whether making phone calls, social media or surfing the internet: Germans are spending more and more time on their smartphones. This is one of the results of the Telecommunications activity report the Federal Network Agency (as of December 2023).
Smartphone usage time: The cell phone as a time waster
According to this, last year Germans made a total of 154 billion minutes of outgoing calls on their smartphones (excluding video calls). For the first time, this corresponds to a doubling of the minutes spent talking on landline telephones (66 billion).
On average, users made 123 minutes of phone calls per month with an active SIM card. For the video call it was an additional 65 minutes. When it comes to surfing the Internet, according to the Federal Network Agency, smartphones used a data volume of 9.1 billion gigabytes last year. This corresponds to an increase of 36 percent compared to the previous year.
How much time do you spend on your cell phone?
The data volume per active SIM card increased to 7.3 gigabytes per month. One of the main reasons for this: streaming series, films and music via smartphones. But the time spent using mobile phones abroad is also increasing.
In the first half of 2023, Germans made a total of 1,410 million minutes of calls from abroad and used 132.5 million gigabytes of data. This also corresponds to a new record. The proportion of SIM cards required for this rose again by 8.4 million compared to the previous year – to 177.4 million.
In the past three months, 104.4 million cards were actively used. This corresponds to a share of 1.2 SIM cards per resident. 30 percent of this comes from prepaid cards. But Germans are not only communicating more and more often via mobile calls, but also via email.
If you want to find out how much time you spend on your smartphone, you can do this using the Screen Time function on an iPhone, for example. We’ll tell you how to do this here.