Samsung phone data puts companion apps ahead of Netflix for app opens in New Zealand

AI companion apps are opened far more often than Netflix on New Zealand phones, according to Samsung usage data reported by lifestyle title Capsule NZ on 13 October. The article frames the finding against national loneliness figures and asks whether the habit should worry anyone.

What we know

Capsule reports that Samsung analysed more than 1.1 million of its phones in New Zealand during May. On that data, owners spent an average of 176.6 hours a month on their handsets, a little over a week, with 48 hours going to social media and 29.6 hours to communication apps.

The headline comparison concerns how often apps are launched, not how long they are used. Capsule says users of companion app Chai opened it an average of 361 times a month, against 22 for Netflix, roughly a sixteen-fold gap. The article states that "the five most-opened entertainment apps in the country are all AI companions," naming Chai, Character AI, Emochi, PolyBuzz and Talkie.

The piece, published during Mental Health Awareness Week, sets the figures beside Ministry of Health survey data on loneliness. It quotes a Samsung New Zealand marketing executive on phones becoming a hub for companionship as well as entertainment.

Why it matters

Open counts are a blunt measure. A chat app is built for many short sessions and a streaming app for a few long ones, so a sixteen-fold gap in launches says little about relative time or spend. The data also covers only Samsung devices, comes from a handset maker with an interest in the story, and Capsule's article does not set out the methodology or how many people use each app.

Even so, the pattern is useful for operators and policy people. Several hundred opens a month works out at around a dozen a day for an engaged user, which is the kind of return frequency social platforms spent years engineering. That is commercially attractive, and it is also the behaviour regulators have in mind when they write rules about dependence and compulsive use. Device-level data from a small market also hints at which brands are winning outside the United States: the list is dominated by character-chat products rather than general assistants.

What to watch

Whether Samsung publishes the underlying dataset or repeats the exercise in other markets, and whether time-spent or user-count figures back up the launch numbers.