Nielsen Android apps reach by age categories has a few surprises: Yahoo! Mail anyone?

Source: Nielsen.

Nielsen, best known for its TV viewing habits research, also performs a lot of research in the mobile world. It released a summary of findings of Android app use by age today. And, while some of the results are reflect what most of us might guess, there are a couple of surprises too in: App-Happy with Android: The Most Popular Android Apps by Age.

Android users were divided into three age groups: 18 to 24, 25 to 34, and 35 to 44. Nielse used proprietary device meters on the smartphones of the thousands of consumer panelists who agreed to be part of Nielsen’s ongoing Smartphone Analytics research to obtain app usage by these age groups.

The Android Market app is the most used app according to Nielsen data for all age groups. Next comes Facebook, Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube. These order of these apps is the same for all age groups too. All of these apps’ reach (the percentage of Android owners who used the app within the past 30 days) are 50% or more.

The surprises lay in the next group of apps with a reach of less than 50% (still large enough to be considered heavily used apps). Advanced Task Killer Free which lets Android users manually stops runnning apps has a greater reach in the 18 to 24 year old group than Angry Birds. And, the app is used enough that it narrowly trails Angry Birds in the two other age groups too. The only other Android game that makes the list is Words With Friends. In fact, it has a slightly greater reach than Angry Birds for the 18 to 24 year old group (26% vs. 22%). Amazon’s alternative to Google Market, its Android AppStore, has increasingly greater reach for older users (14%, 22%, 24%). The biggest surprise, in my opinion, is that the Yahoo! Mail for Android app has enough reach to be in every age groups’ list (13%, 17%, 20%). Like the Amazon AppStore, Yahoo! Mail has more reach in the older age groups.

It is also interesting to note what is not in the list. In particular, I found it interesting that the Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare apps do not appear at all in the lists.