New research shows that we touch our smartphones more than 2,600 times a day. Research firm, dscout, in the US recruited more than 100,000 participants.

The study also found that the average user spends around 2.42 hours on their device, while heavy users spent around 3.75 hours. 

The heaviest users were found to touch their phones 5,427 times a day. Over the course of a year, this amounts to nearly 1 million touches on average, per user. 

These interactions involve typing out texts, scrolling through Facebook feeds, turning pages in Kindle books, and more, all at short and frequent intervals.

The research tracked every interaction made by 94 Android users for 24 hours over five consecutive days. The key findings of the survey are: 

• Users prefer to keep phone sessions on the shorter side with rare cases of long usage times: Average users engaged in 76 separate phone sessions a day, totaling 2.42 hours. Heavy users averaged 132 sessions per day, totaling 3.75 hours. The longer usage times, spent either watching a video on Netflix or reading a book in the Kindle app, were far less preferred to shorter browsing sessions with multiple breaks.
• A large portion of interactions are spent within messaging and social apps: On average, users spent 26% of their time on messaging and social media apps, and 10% of their time on internet search browsers. Additionally, Facebook had the most touches with 15% of interactions, native messaging apps followed with 11%, the home screen had 9%, and Chrome had 5%.
• Usage time surges at key points during the day: The average number of touches began as soon as participants woke up — around 7 a.m. — and accelerated through the evening. Interestingly, 87% of participants interacted with their devices between midnight and 5 a.m.