We introduce a new approach to monitoring the activity of smartphone users based on their physical interactions with the interface. Typical events are taps, scrolling and typing, carried out to interact with apps. As compared to other measures, this directly encapsulates potential problematic physical smartphone behaviour as a signal. The approach contrasts against conventions such as self-reporting or timing activity sessions, and it focusses on active rather than passive smartphone activity. Using this alternative method, we collected all user interface interaction events from a sample of 64 participants over a period of 8 weeks, using a bespoke monitoring app called Tymer. User Smartphone Addiction was seen to significantly correlate with high levels of interaction with Lifestyle apps, particularly for female users. Interactions with Social apps in general were also associated with Smartphone Addiction. In particular, user interactions with Snapchat correlated with Smartphone Addiction, represented across all types of interface interaction. This is significant given the widespread usage of Snapchat by teenagers, and we hypothesise that the app's design provides a particularly strong pathway in support of Smartphone Addiction.

ObjectiveRecent years have seen an increasing number of studies using smartphones to sample participants’ mood states. Moods are usually collected by asking participants for their current mood or for a recollection of their mood states over a specific period of time. The current study investigates the reasons to favour collecting mood through current or daily mood surveys and outlines design recommendations for mood sampling using smartphones based on these findings. These recommendations are also relevant to more general smartphone sampling procedures.Results N=64 participants completed a series of surveys at the beginning and end of the study providing information such as gender, personality, or smartphone addiction score. Through a smartphone application, they reported their current mood 3 times and daily mood once per day for 8 weeks. We found that none of the examined intrinsic individual qualities had an effect on matches of current and daily mood reports. However timing played a significant role: the last followed by the first reported current mood of the day were more likely to match the daily mood. Current mood surveys should be preferred for a higher sampling accuracy, while daily mood surveys are more suitable if compliance is more important.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13104-017-2808-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Snapchat is a highly popular smartphone app that allows personalised multimedia communication for spontaneous experiences, where the shared content disappears after a short period of time. In this paper, we examine the predictors of Snapchat usage based on a range of data collected through surveys and from interaction with the handset, using a cohort of 64 recruited participants. The results show that age, Smartphone Addiction, happiness and the use of the popular chatting apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are significant predictors for Snapchat usage. We discuss the implications of these findings against the related literature, and also against the design of the app itself.

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An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.