Exposure to urban and rural contexts shapes smartphone usage behavior

Smartphones have profoundly changed human life. Nevertheless, the factors that shape how we use our smartphones remain unclear, in part due to limited availability of usage-data. Here, we investigate the impact of a key environmental factor: users’ exposure to urban and rural contexts. Our analysis is based on a global dataset describing mobile app usage and location for ∼500,000 individuals. We uncover strong and nontrivial patterns. First, we confirm that rural users tend to spend less time on their phone than their urban counterparts. We find, however, that individuals in rural areas tend to use their smartphones for activities such as gaming and social media. In cities, individuals preferentially use their phone for activities such as navigation and business. Are these effects (1) driven by differences between individuals who choose to live in urban vs. rural environments or do they (2) emerge because the environment itself affects online behavior? Using a quasi-experimental design based on individuals that move from the city to the countryside—or vice versa—we confirm hypothesis (2) and find that smartphone use changes according to users’s environment. This work presents a quantitative step forward towards understanding how the interplay between environment and smartphones impacts human lives. As such, our findings could provide information to better regulate persuasive technologies embedded in smartphone apps. Further, our work opens the door to understanding new mechanisms leading to urban/rural divides in political and socioeconomic attitudes.