Pakistanis used mobile apps for 99 billion hours in 2023

Pakistan witnessed an unprecedented surge in mobile app usage in 2023, with citizens spending 99 billion hours on various mobile applications, a report published by Data Darbar revealed on Saturday. 

The South Asian country was ranked tenth worldwide in hours spent on smartphones.

The report unveiled that Pakistan boasted 124 million broadband subscribers last year, with an average monthly data usage of 7.5GB per user. 

Pakistan saw a marginal increase in the mobile app market, with the country experiencing a mere 0.3% growth in app downloads compared to the previous year. 

Video-streaming giant TikTok clinched the top spot as the most downloaded app in Pakistan with 31.8 million downloads. 

Following closely behind were WhatsApp Business with 23.9 million downloads, Facebook (23.4 million downloads), WhatsApp (22.8 million downloads) and CapCut (20.6 million downloads).

Despite the surge in broadband penetration, which reached 53.6 percent in FY23, up from 51 percent the previous year, the telecommunications sector faced a setback with the first decline in total cellular subscriptions in at least six years. 

The closure of FY23 marked a decline from 194.6 million to 190.9 million subscriptions.

However, this decline was mitigated by a surge in 4G subscriptions, which increased by 12.5 million, offsetting the decline in 3G subscriptions by 3.8 million.