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Facebook and Google are battling it out to dominate your smartphone time and, for now, Facebook is winning.

According to the latest stats from comScore, Facebook was the most popular mobile app in the United States in 2012. The Google Maps app held the top position until October, when Apple rolled out its latest mobile operating system, iOS 6, and replaced the built-in Google Maps app with its own, less accurate version.

Of course, Facebook also had a hand in its own success. Its number of monthly unique visitors rose steadily over the course of the year. In August, the company rolled out a long overdue revamp of its iOS mobile app for iPhone and iPads, significantly speeding up the launch, scroll and browsing times. User reviews in Apple's App Store shot up as a result, and in December the company followed up with a better version of its Android app.

Review: Facebook's Graph Search is promising but incomplete

Study: Some Facebook users envious

Facebook started 2012 facing criticisms of its mobile strategy, and while there are still lingering questions about how it will make money off of mobile, these stats show its adept at transferring the Facebook experience to tablets and smartphones.

People aren't just opening their Facebook app the most, they're spending astonishingly large chunks of time in the app, poking around and reading up on their friends. The social network's app was the single largest, single app time suck, accounting for 23% of the time people spend using mobile apps, according to comScore. Instagram was a distant second accounting for just 3% of the time people spend in apps. Google's app with the most engagement was Gmail, but in total 10% of users' time was spent across various Google apps.

A significant rise in smartphone attacks is predicted every year, and it hasn't happened yet. But that isn't stopping major security firms from saying this will be the year that phones will finally emerge as a major target for cybercriminals. There are many reasons why smartphones are vulnerable. For one, they run most of the same software that smartphone users also use on their computers. Smartphones also have many additional capabilities that hackers can exploit. They can connect to other potentially vulnerable devices using Bluetooth and send and receive text messages, for example.

But smartphones are also increasingly being used as mobile wallets. That's why cybersecurity experts believe mobile payment systems are likely to be the next big target for cybercriminals.

According to research from Juniper Networks (JNPR), 300 million smartphones around the world will be equipped with the near-field communications (NFC) chips needed for mobile payments. Juniper predicts global NFC transactions will total nearly $50 billion this year. http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/08/technology/security/smartphone-cyberattacks/index.html