Mark Zuckerberg figured out a powerful rule about smartphone apps before everyone else - now we're seeing how important it is to Facebook's business

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

• Facebook's family of apps takes up almost a third of all time spent in apps worldwide, according to new data.
• The stat illustrates just how deeply entrenched in our digital lives the Silicon Valley company has become in recent years.
• CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists his company doesn't have a monopoly, but it clearly has unparalleled dominance of smartphones.

Testifying before US Congress in April, Mark Zuckerberg insisted to senators that Facebook wasn't a monopoly, arguing that "the average American uses eight different apps to communicate with their friends."

Even so, Facebook and its family of apps take up an astonishing amount of the time people spend on their smartphones.

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According to new data from app-analysis firm Apptopia seen by Business Insider, time spent in Facebook's apps make up almost a third of the all the time people spend on the 100 most popular apps across Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile operating systems.

In other words, of every 100 minutes spent in the world's most popular apps, 32 of those are gobbled up by Facebook - whether that's in Facebook itself, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, or its other apps. ...

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