Study says, Indian smartphone users live by zero balance for 7.5 days per month

Looks like yesterday night's announcement will hardly affect the smartphone users in the country. Becuase as per True Balance user activity survey India's prepaid smartphone users on average go 7.5 days without balance. Which means, not functioning without balance for a few more days should not affect them.

True Balance, a prepaid mobile balance manager for Android users, where users can track and recharge the balance of their prepaid mobile phones. It topped 10 million downloads in just 19 months since its launch in 2014. The number of users keeps increasing with useful features like one touch viewing and recharging and tracking the balance without using data.

The True Balance user activity survey generated a lot of data one of which suggested that Thursday at 8:00 pm is the time when most pre-paid users charge their balance the most. Looks like gearing up for the weekend and the long chatting sessions post working days.

If we look at the numbers, a majority of Smartphone users in India, about 200 million, use prepaid mobile services. Once they use up their fixed monthly charge, they go without any balance left (zero balance day). For the month of September 2016, zero balance day was 7.5 days on average nationwide, and it was the highest in Mumbai with 9.4 days, followed by Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka with 8.9 days, 8.6 days, and 8.4 days, respectively.

The time the most recharging activity occurred (highest recharging time) was 8PM Thursday. Phone calls and data usage occurred mostly after-work hours from late afternoon to evening. Users also frequently recharge their balance on Wednesday and Monday evenings.

"As the number of smartphone users increases in India, we can see unique usage patterns by time and by region," said Cheol-won Lee, CEO of Balance Hero. "We will continue to upgrade our services through analyzing these patterns on True Balance so that our users can efficiently manage call times and data usage."

Based on the September record, the region that spent the highest amount on recharging is Chennai, with a one-time charging amount of INR 182.24 on average. The second goes to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) which was once the capital of India, with INR 172.77, and the third is Rajasthan with INR 163.69.

Regions that topped the recharging amounts with a high one-time recharging amount were Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai and Karnataka, demonstrating that users in economical and commercial hubs spend more for communication.