450 Million Minutes Of Talking Shows Us COVID-19 Changed Smartphone Use

Texting is nice. Zoom is great for work and birthday parties.

And Facebook works for our wider circle of friends.

But for close friends, if it's not live-streaming video Houseparty style, it's probably good old fashioned voice. At least during a pandemic shutdown in which we haven't been able to see our friends and family as much as we'd like.

Apparently, we can use those smart game-playing video-watching news-reading glass and plastic objects in our hands for ... actually talking to people.

TextNow says its users spent more than 450 million minutes talking on the phone in the first full month of shutdown, March. While once that might not have been a shocking thing to say, it's up 36% more than the previous month, and totals 313,000 days or 850 years of cumulative time talking on the phone. Texts are up too, jumping 35% to almost a billion.

This is a massive change.

"People are craving personal connection while social distancing, and that has led to a significant increase in activity on our platform over the past couple of months," says Derek Ting, CEO of TextNow. "The phone call has experienced a resurgence during the quarantine and I think that's going to continue as people look to stay connected in an uncertain world."

Voice minutes have been down since 2015, the first year since the Great Depression that international carrier voice traffic declined. In 2018, voice minutes declined in India. In 2020, Australia joined the club. The U.S. has been seeing a similar trend for a decade, all the way back to 2010.

So to see voice minutes jump is somewhat shocking.

TextNow sounds like it's mostly about texting. But it's an app for both texting and calling, for free, with a real phone number. The company says it's the largest free phone service provider in the United States, but has customers globally.

States with the biggest jumps correlate largely to regions with large numbers of young people and migrant workers. When comparing the period of time from February 17 to March 17 to the time between March 17 to April 17, calls were up in California, Colorado, Florida, Texas, and Washington.

California (phone calls up 13%, messages up 15%)

Colorado (phone calls up 17%, messages up 16%)

Florida (phone calls up 13%, messages up 13%)

Texas (phone calls up 11%, messages up 10%)

Washington State (phone calls up 19%, messages up 13%)

Some states, however, were only up slightly:

Illinois (phone calls up 1%, messages up 4%)

New Jersey (phone calls up 16%, messages up 25%)

New York (phone calls up 4%, messages up 4%)

Pennsylvania (phone calls up 4%, messages up 5%)

There's just something about live, synchronous voice that connects us in a way that texting doesn't. And while streaming video via FaceTime or Facebook Messenger, or multi-user focused options like Houseparty might be a great option for many, some are apparently returning to their roots.

And using phones for what once they only did.

And for what until now, we've almost kind of forgotten about.

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