Remember last month when we talked about the first of a new monthly report series from the developers of Soluto?

Using the data they get from their PC Gnome, a large anonymous data set which reflects info about the devices running their Soluto performance monitoring software, they can grab some very interesting info about those devices.

Last month they looked at the top 10 laptops based on the number of crashes they experience which was interesting but not very controversial.

This month they are looking at stats for machines running Windows 8 and how often Metro/Modern Apps are used on those machines.

To say the results are a bit controversial is an understatement and they are quite surprising.

Caveat – these stats are only based on machines running Windows 8 that are also running the Soluto monitoring software and not every single Windows 8 device out there.

With that said this analysis, according to Soluto’s report, is based on 10,848 Windows 8 machines and 313,142 Metro app launches across 9,634 unique Metro apps.

Here are some key take away points.

  • How many times a day will a Windows 8 user launch a Metro App?
    • Desktop – 1.41 times
    • Laptop – 1.51 times
    • Touch Laptop – 2.22 times
    • Tablet – 2.71 times
  • Percentage of users who launch a Metro App less than once per day.
    • Desktop – 60.78%
    • Laptop – 59.88%
    • Touch Laptop – 58.10%
    • Tablet – 44.38%

That is an average of 1.52 Metro App launches per day with 60% of desktop and laptop users launching less than 1 Metro App per day and less than half (44%) of tablet users launching Metro Apps less than once per day.

I have to admit I am blown away by these numbers and surprised at how few people in this data set are using Metro Apps. It is really mind boggling to be honest.  I guess it shows that many users are simply using Windows 8 as a desktop operating system and skipping the Metro/Modern interface completely.  If Microsoft is seeing similar stats from their telemetry on Windows 8 systems maybe it is a pretty good bet that Boot To Desktop will be in the Windows 8.1 release despite it not being confirmed to this point.

Soluto’s report goes on to list the most used Metro Apps in Windows 8 from their data set and the top 10 include:

  • Windows Communications Apps (Microsoft)
  • Windows Photos (Microsoft)
  • Microsoft Reader (Microsoft)
  • Microsoft Camera (Microsoft)
  • Bing Weather (Microsoft)
  • Zune Video (Microsoft)
  • Zune Music (Microsoft)
  • Netflix (Netflix)
  • Bing Maps (Microsoft)
  • SkyDrive (Microsoft)

Interesting to see that 9 of the top 10 are Microsoft’s built in Metro/Modern Apps and the only non Microsoft app to climb into the top 10 is the very popular Netflix streaming video app.

The most used app across all form factors of devices is the Yahoo! Mail App which is used an average of 27 times per week by those users who have it installed.

You can read the full report at http://www.soluto.com/reports

No doubt it will be interesting to watch the reaction to this report across the tech blogs today and what kinds of opinions it generates from the Windows 8 pundits.

What do you think – are you surprised by these stats for such low Metro/Modern App usage?