Date of Award

Fall 1-15-2016

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Thomas Blum

Abstract

Research has found that Americans spend 4.5 hours watching television, 1.5 hours listening to the radio, about half an hour reading print and spend a whooping five plus hours per day in digital media (online, mobile, other). Out of these five hours, two hours and twenty minutes are spent on a mobile device (phone or tablet), which is a massive increase of about 575 percent from the twenty-four minutes that was reported in 2010. Flurry, an analytic app company, released data about their tracking of more than 300,000 apps in 2013, and they found the average time spent per day on mobile devices is two hours and thirty-eight minutes. They further found that 80 percent of the time is spent on apps and only 20 percent on the actual browser itself. Based off these findings, it can be concluded that Americans are spending more time online than on any other media, that digital time is on mobile devices, and that mobile time is spent mostly on apps (Samson, 2015).

Businesses are catching on to the fact that people are spending more time on their mobile devices doing activities that they once did with computers such as shopping, maintaining their calendars, and playing games. They are creating apps to accommodate these activities on mobile devices. In order to keep current customers and attract new ones businesses realize that portability is the future in how a business interacts with customers. Companies realize that to have an effective mobile presence requires more than just creating a website that is mobile friendly. So, small to medium-sized companies are creating their own dedicated apps to try an even the playing field against the big boys like Walmart and Starbucks.

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