Smartphone Apps Can Help Tell a User's Age, Gender, and Income, Experts Say

By looking at what is and has been on a person's smartphone, you can easily tell quite a lot about them. Due to the flood of technological advancements coming in all the time, it may come as no surprise that a person's smartphone may be a key to predicting their age and possibly even their income.

According to the Daily Mail, researchers have taken and analyzed the application choices of numerous Android users and they say that these can provide information on demographics such as age, gender, and as mentioned before income.

The researchers, from Verto Analytics Finland and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, based their model on the app downloads of 3,760 Android users. They looked at every application used since in a one month period last year and then removed those, which were not used at least 10 times.

The data set created features almost 8,840 unique applications. It shows some surprising results, whilst others proved to be less than surprising. Some of the less than surprising findings include that dating applications are popular among single users, Job Search is popular among low-income users, and LinkedIn was popular among high-income users.

Pinterest users are more likely to be female at 76% while ESPN users are more likely to be male at 85%. Snapchat is attributed by the study to a younger audience, while married, older users used apps such as Walmart and Zillow more often. Uber users were also found to be of the single variety more often than not.

"Large differences in the predictability were observed between the six demographic attributes studied in this work," says the researchers. "Gender [is] the most predictable and income being the hardest to predict," they add. Websites such as the Washington Post have come up with similar quizzes claiming they can do the same thing.