# Analysis of the Pre and Post-COVID-19 Lockdown Use of Smartphone Apps in Spain
## 6 Discussion  
One of the primary objectives of this study was to examine the changes in the use of smartphone applications in the context of a high-impact social change in the external environment; specifically, to study the differences in the use of smartphones during the weeks before and after the first confinement in Spain caused by the global health crisis of COVID-19 in 2020. This study adds a relatively novel element to the literature by demonstrating the effects of external factors on the use of smartphones, and describing the relationships between the use of smartphones and personal, technological and social  
Figure 10: Comparison between the groups with the largest decrease and increase in the usage time of the selected applications after the lockdown. The most relevant social variables selected are those that present a significant statistical difference when contrasting hypotheses about the difference of the means of both groups by the statistical \(t\)-test. variables. In particular, the results suggest that future research on the screen time of mobile devices should present reliable and objective measures and should, either by design or by statistical analysis, take into account the influence of external factors (as, in this case, the breakout of a pandemic causing a home confinement). The initial hypothesis is that these changes in use caused by changes in the social environment could have a profound impact on a greater use of the smartphone and its applications. The results obtained are in line with other research works ([PERSON] & [PERSON], 2021 [1]). As some users admitted in a qualitative research, the users' screen time has increased considerably, and the smartphone has become more than an instrument to communicate with others in the initial post-lockdown in Spain. The initial analysis reflects, at a macroscopic level, that the smartphone use increased (or maintained its level of use) in applications such as WhatsApp in all groups. To delve into the enormous diversity of user behaviors, a cluster analysis was carried out--in line with other investigations that have studied the evolution in the use of mobile applications ([PERSON] et al., 2020 [49]; [PERSON] et al., 2016 [50])--by means of manifold machine learning techniques that allow an improvement in the visualization of changes in the use of smartphones over time and that is one of the fundamental contributions of this research. We noticed that in almost every group of users there is a notable reduction in the game applications usage in the first weeks of confinement. Games have a larger process component than social apps, although process-oriented online games can have a strong social component too, as in massively multiplayer games. It therefore seems that although the largest share of usage time of the smartphones in Spain was represented by social and communication apps (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram), there were also increases in process-oriented apps (for example, browsing in Chrome, possibly for news consumption). What this research does show is that--at least in the first weeks of confinement--the use of entertainment apps such as games was significantly reduced. The need to be informed and to know about family and friends' health situation possibly had a notable influence on this aspect, temporarily causing people to leave games aside but retaking them afterwards to cope with the boredom brought by the confinement. Therefore our research partially supports the CIUT ([PERSON], 2014 [8]) which establishes that the hedonic use of a smartphone (consistent with the use of the process) could be a means to compensate for negative emotion and would be more in line with others studies that found that problematic smartphone use is more related to social use ([PERSON] et al., 2014 [51]; [PERSON] & [PERSON], 2016 [52]). Our findings suggest that the increase in post-lockdown smartphone use stands out, fundamentally, in one of the four groups of users obtained by clustering (Figure 4).