Phone addiction world rankings show the US at No. 20

There are some world rankings where you want to be near the top, and some where you definitely don’t – phone addiction being one of the latter …

Electronics Hub reports its meta analysis of two studies, and says that Americans only rank 20th when it comes to the percentage of waking hours they spend staring at their phone screen.

We analyzed DataReportal’s Digital 2023: Global Overview Report to find country-level data for screen time, with information provided from a range of sources, including Semrush and SimilarWeb.

We then looked at sleep patterns data from Sleep Cycle to find average sleep times for residents in each country, allowing us to calculate the percentage of awake hours relative to screen time for each category of device.

Phone addiction rankings

The rankings of the top 20 countries spending the highest percentage of their waking time using their smartphones show that the Philippines heads the list.

Our phones have many uses, but who spends the most time on them? People in the Philippines spend almost a third of their day (32.53%) on their phones the most of any country. Brazil follows very closely with 32.46%.

Despite being home to the highest number of smartphone users in the world (more than 950 million, according to Statista), China spends just 19.54% of its day on phones.

Here’s the top 20:

1. Philippines
2. Brazil
3. South Africa
4. Thailand
5. Argentina
6. Indonesia
7. Chile
8. Colombia
9. Mexico
10. Turkey
11. Malaysia
12. UAE
13. Romania
14. Saudi Arabia
15. Taiwan
16. India
17. Portugal
18. Russia
19. Israel
20. USA

The figure for the US is 21.14% of waking hours.

But this isn’t the whole picture

Smartphones are of course just one of the screens we stare at in the course of the day. By the time you add in computers and tablets, the figures rise dramatically.

1. South Africa 58.21%
2. Brazil 56.61%
3. Philippines 54.44%
4. Argentina 53.80%
5. Colombia 53.20%
6. Chile 51.59%
7. Mexico 48.60%
8. Thailand 48.56%
9. Russia 48.01%
10. Malaysia 47.34%

Here, the US comes in at 42.58%, and the UK at 35.66%. The least screen time is Japan, at 21.7%.

Via Matt Navara | Photo: Warren Wong/Unsplash

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