With hundreds of thousands available apps on smartphones nowadays, and so many services being turned into mobile apps, it’s no wonder why more people use apps rather than the web when it comes to their smartphones.  With an app, you just launch it and everything you need is there but if you use the web, you waste time typing and searching.  And with the small screens on smartphones, it’s quite frustrating at times to input search topics.

Nielsen Smartphone Analytics, a new research program that collects data from usage meters voluntarily installed on thousands of iOS and Android smartphones, found that a person typically spends 56 minutes on his smartphone to access the web or use apps.  In that 56 minutes, only 33% or 19 minutes is spent using the Web while 67% or 37 minutes is spent using apps.

Approximately, there are 250,000 available apps for Android, but not all of them are being utilized.  Only the top 50 apps make up 61% of all app usage on the platform.  Simply put, the 37 minutes spent by Android users on apps are focused on the top 50 apps, leaving thousands of apps, 249,500 or 39%, just lying around in the Android Market, screaming for attention.

And this is the dilemma of app makers, even if they make a great app, how can they get noticed?  Apps are piling up every day.  This also causes problems for users.  As an app lover myself, I like exploring new apps, but with thousands of apps to go through, it’s really overwhelming.  And it’s really frustrating to look for apps, read the description and after you download it you don’t get what you want, the descriptions sometimes do not match the content of the app.  App makers can’t really blame users for only downloading top apps, which can seem far more trustworthy than doing the digging on your own.

As for mobile web browsing, it’s really frustrating, aside from the aforementioned input hassles, most sites are not really optimized to be seen on smartphones.  Some need a Flash player just so you can open it.  And some, though you can open it, you’d have to zoom in just so you can read the text, it takes longer to read just one line.

There’s a few things that come into play here, with developing trends around broadening the ways in which mobile devices are utilized.  Tablets offer a good medium between smartphones’ small screens and computers’ lack of mobility, while HTML5 is extending mobile services’ potential with a solution that works across most devices, on all major platforms.

Engagement comes into play as well, with competition rising in the Android Market as more apps fight to gain recognition.  Becoming one of those top apps is a hard-fought battle, and finding the best balance for earning user attention is a mix of strategies across features, marketing and press.  A recent report from Appcelerator looks at some of these issues faced by developers, noting the use of social media as a way to incorporate more engagement for their apps.  There’s already a noted shift away from a sole presence on just one market, as the consumer becomes the focus, instead of the market or the platform.

There are a lot of factors still to address when it comes to the mobile industry, and Nielsen’s new smartphone reports will continue to gain insight, but I’m anxious for a look at the emerging tablet market as well.