# Analysis of the Pre and Post-COVID-19 Lockdown Use of Smartphone Apps in Spain
## 6 Discussion
From these results, we may highlight that:  
* The particular behavior of Group 3 stands out from the rest. Group 3 has almost zero mean in Phone usage, Apps usage and Games usage. This group has the least usage time, so this may lead to mistakenly conclude that this group may be made up of older users typically less familiarized with technologies. Surprisingly, it seems that the Age distribution shifts slightly towards lower ages than the average. * With regard to users in Group 4, despite having above-average smartphone usage, there is no logical explanation about the low usage time of the selected apps. The reason behind this could be that the smartphone use is reflected in other applications not included in the analysis, or in phone utilities such as reminders, notes or especially phone calls. * Group 2 has a much higher average value in Apps usage than Group 1, which means that Group 2 includes those users who use social networks and messaging services most often, in particular most of the apps we have included in our study. In addition, Group 2 is made up of younger users who tend to have more recent Android versions than users in Group 1. From Figures 6 and 7 we can interpret that:* The mean of Group 3 general Phone usage increases drastically after the lockdown except for gaming applications and Spotify, where the increase is moderate. It is worth noting in this group the exceptional increase in the use of communication applications and social networks (WhatsApp, Facebook) and navigation applications (Chrome). * Groups 1 and 2 slightly decreased their use of the smartphone. This is consistent with the Phone usage pre-post statistics in Figure 6. From that figure, it appears that for both groups, the use of games apps has decreased considerably. In particular, in Group 1, the general decrease in usage time stems from the drop in usage time of the selected set of apps (mainly Games and YouTube for Group 1, Games, Instagram and Facebook for Group 2). Phone usage in both groups is similar in pre-lockdown and in post-lockdown. * For Group 4, while the use in the selected apps (Apps usage) has increased, the decrease in the Games usage and other applications has balanced this increase, making the total Phone usage almost constant during the analyzed time span. The performed machine learning analysis has been connected with psychological indicators, attempting to explore the sociodemographic, personality and behavioral factors that relate to the groups. No significant differences were found in the sociodemographic and personality profiles of the groups obtained. Again, it seems that diversity is a characteristic element among smartphone users. To finish the analysis in an exploratory way, users have been segmented into those with the most and least use, obtaining that there are personal variables (sex, age, addiction, depression, open personality), social variables (SDP, neighborhood status) and technological variables (version of the Operating System and malware risk). These variables are used repeatedly in the scientific literature to explain Smartphone addiction which, in many cases, is related to excessive use of the Internet (Busch & McCarthy, 2020 [36]). In Figure 9 we represented the profiles of the users with the highest and lowest Phone use. The comparison between both groups reveals some interesting facts. First, it seems that those who spend less time using the selected apps are on average older and clearly have older Android versions. Regarding other features, the group with the lowest use exhibit less addiction, SDP and depression than the group with the highest use. However, users in the low usage time group, which have a lesser presence in social networks and messaging apps, present a higher risk of malware infection, according to the scan carried out on the devices. Alternatively, we compared the groups that experienced the largest increase and decrease in smartphone use (Figure 10).