The advertising industry is seeking to use the unique data provided by the increasing usage of mobile devices and mobile applications (apps) to improve targeting and the experience with apps. As a consequence, understanding user behaviours with apps has gained increased interests from both academia and industry. In this paper we study user app engagement patterns and disruptions of those patterns in a data set unique in its scale and coverage of user activity. First, we provide a detailed account of temporal user activity patterns with apps and compare these to previous studies on app usage behavior. Then, in the second part, and the main contribution of this work, we take advantage of the scale and coverage of our sample and show how app usage behavior is disrupted through major political, social, and sports events.
mobile