The sweet spot for mobile apps

Its often said that the rise of mobile devices means that many people are now always on. But it turns out there are definite times when people are more plugged in than others. And if youre a mobile app advertiser, the more information you have about when people are really paying attention to their mobile content, the better.

To that end, real-time bidding mobile ad exchange company Mobclix has assembled all the behavioral data it saw on iOS and Android users across multiple devices during the month of June. A couple of the studys findings were pretty interesting:

The late afternoon (between 4pm and 6pm) and the evening (9pm to 11pm) are the most popular times for people to use mobile apps. But theyre actually most engaged with ads within those apps at a completely different time, during the morning hours from 8am to 11am.

Weekends are far and away the most popular time for users to tool around on their mobile devices, with Saturday and Sunday accounting for 38 percent of the total time spent on mobile apps.

Although many advertisers tend to focus their efforts toward Apple devices such as the iPhone, the Android platform actually holds the highest market share in the U.S., the U.K. and Japan.

Mobclix has put together all the research into a nifty series of infographics, which Ive embedded here (click to enlarge):