Android app usage: women love Facebook, men love Google+

People assume sports and games are the best apps for men, while texting and reading categories have the best apps for women. But Nielsen research data suggests that app usage by gender, at least among Android users, are fairly close.

The Nielsen Top Android Apps by Active Reach chart shows that app usage by gender has common ties. Both the beauties and the brutes use Google Maps, Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube consistently, making those titles rank among the most popular Android apps. However, the ranking order for popular apps men like and apps women like differs.

Not including the Android Market, Google Maps is the most used app among men, but it’s only the third most used app among women. The stereotypes about men not being willing to ask for directions are clearly false. We have no problem asking, so long as it’s not another human being providing the answer.

The most popular Android app used by women is Facebook; 81 percent of women Android owners actively use it while only 66.9 percent of men use the app. Women also held a greater share in Twitter (16.5 to 13.4) and Scrabble-clone Words With Friends (20.3 to 12.2).

The Nielsen chart actually lends some credence to one stereotype about app usage by gender. Google Plus is often said to have an overwhelmingly-male audience, and that is exactly what Nielsen found. Men more than doubled women in usage of the Google+ Android app – 15.9 percent to 7.2 percent. Perhaps that’s because, as Rhonda Callow notes, most of the current Google Plus audience is among early adopters, a crowd that is mostly male.

Looking at this chart, it’s clear that there are practically no differences in the apps that most appeal to men and women. We all love to laugh at silly YouTube videos, destroy pigs with Angry Birds, and check tomorrow’s temperature in The Weather Channel app. The only differences are how much interest each sex displays in a particular app.