A Finnish mobile analytics company, Zokem, has published the results of a fascinating new survey which shows that native mobile apps on our ubiquitous smartphones now make up roughly half of all mobile data volume.

The completion of the study spanned a year and involved the careful analysis of some 10,000 smartphone users during better than six million smartphone app-usage sessions in 16 countries.

According to the findings of the study, mobile browsers remain the most popular consumer of mobile data, but apps have kept pace – and kept even – with mobile browser usage. The data presented reveals that as mobile apps continue to become more popular aspects of daily smartphone use, mobile browsers will soon be bumped to second place.

Zokem, however, is already claiming that native data applications already capture 50 percent of all data traffic in terms of volume, and 46 percent of data usage in terms of time spent accessing content.

\”Whereas mobile Web browsing is still growing fast, interestingly the use of native data apps is growing even faster, thanks to app stores and a constantly increasing number of pre-embedded easy-to-use mobile data apps to be found in today\’s smartphones\”, says Dr. Hannu Verkasalo, executive chairman of Zokem. \”Only a few years ago Web browsing was about 70-80 percent of smartphone-driven Internet usage, but now it seems to be changing.\”

The findings presented in the Zokem study indicate that developers are hitting one home run after the next with their applications that continue to provide such top-notch user experiences that the mobile browser is no longer as essential as it was in the not-so-distant past for many services and functionalities.