There are about 280 million people across the world who use mobile apps more than 60 times a day, data analysis showed Wednesday.

According to a report by U.S. mobile app analytics institution Flurry, acquired by Yahoo, the number of “mobile addicts” -- people who opened their mobile applications over 60 times a day -- was estimated at around 280 million worldwide in the second quarter 2015, a 59 percent increase from the same period in 2014.

The number of “regular users,” who opened mobile applications less than 16 times a day, increased by 25 percent this year with 985 million people, while the number of “super users” – who open apps between 16 to 60 times a day – increased by 34 percent with 590 million people worldwide.

If the number of “addicts” were a country, it would be the fourth-largest country in the world after China, India and the United States.

Among the five categories where “addicts” showed more than twice the average amount of usage, messaging and social media apps were the most dominant category, as they used those apps 6.56 times more than the average user.

This was significantly higher than those for utilities and productivity (5.27 times higher), games (3 times), finance (2.5 times) and news and magazines (2 times).

Flurry said this supported their analysis that messaging is mobile’s “killer app,” and that heavy users turn to their smart devices for every aspect of their lives.

Flurry also noted the use of finance apps among the heaviest users, and mentioned recent findings by the Bank of America that reported that 48 percent of their consumers were active app users.

Flurry said that the mobile industry was developing fast and that it was getting harder to predict the number in the “addicts” category for next year.

“One thing is clear though, Bank of America’s founders didn’t plan that 111 years after the creation of their bank, half of its consumers would only visit one branch — the one in their pocket,” it added.

By Sang Youn-joo (sangyj@heraldcorp.com)