If you’ve been following the Apptive blog or any of our social channels, then you have probably noticed a major trend: people are absolutely addicted to their mobile devices. There have been numerous reports around what people are doing on their phones (hint – mobile commerce is a biggie), but who are these people? Flurry recently put out a report on these “mobile addicts,” defining an addict as, “a consumer that launches apps more than 60 times per day.” While some of their findings were intuitive, others were very surprising!

Right off the bat, we can determine that there are two major age ranges for mobile addicts. First, we see individuals categorized as addicts making up 49% of the age range 18-24. No major shock there. However, the next largest category of mobile addicts? Age range 35-54, with addicts making up 40% of that population! This number becomes even more interesting when you consider this: middle aged (35-54) individuals only make up 20% of the overall mobile population, but they make up over 28% of mobile addicts.

These numbers are surprising in a general sense, but what do they mean from a personality perspective? Is there currently a particularly large number of tech enthusiasts making up the gamut of these age ranges? The answer is…not really. In fact, two of the top personas for male and females were Moms (on the female side) and Parenting and Education (on the male side). Not to say that parents can’t also be tech enthusiasts (in fact, they probably are given their new addiction to mobile), but that is not their primary personality trait as identified by their research.

Flurry offers a final point on the middle-aged parenting subsection that begs discussion. Many of them may very well be sharing devices around the family, meaning that they could be over-represented as addicts when in reality the per-person app rate would not place them in that category.

That being said, it seems that overall when we look at mobile addicts it is most likely to be young adults or, failing that, their parents!