When you last checked your mobile or home internet bill, did you reach for your phone or sit down with your laptop or desktop computer? According to a new JD Power study, people would rather access their accounts via apps than websites. And that preference is especially strong when it comes to telecom companies such as mobile carriers and home internet providers (which increasingly overlap).

According to the 2026 US Telecom Digital Experience Study, surveyed customers gave app login an average satisfaction score of 681 for wireless carriers and 689 for internet service providers (out of 1,000 points). Website login trailed those by 38 points and 42 points, respectively. JD Power gathered evaluations from 12,082 customers of eight internet providers and 14 wireless carriers.

Biometric logins were a major factor in the decision. When accessing an account, there are always one or more layers of authentication just to get in. An app tends to speed you through the door using face or finger recognition to sign in or load a passkey.

Built-in services like Apple's Passwords app can also use biometrics to unlock and fill in saved credentials in websites, but the experience isn't as smooth. JD Power noted that maintenance issues and slow responsiveness also derail the website login experience across both segments.

Kristen Coffin, digital solutions analyst at JD Power, noted that people keep coming back to apps because their access to them is  already set up. "Digital containment is very important in terms of solving issues," she said. "Having those self serve tasks easy to use and readily available [for customers] is key."

This helps explain why carriers have invested heavily in improving their apps. For one, T-Mobile's T-Life app is increasingly the central point of customer interaction. And AT&T just this week rolled out a new app -- named simply AT&T -- that is a single resource for its mobile and broadband customers.

AT&T's Jeff Dixon, assistant vice president of Digital Product Management and Development, emphasized the importance of speed in the company's app overhaul. 

"We did focus on performance to make it snappy throughout," he said, noting extensive architectural work on back-end services to cache and pre-fetch data.

The study also found that the gap between satisfaction with telecom companies' apps and websites was wider than in other industries, suggesting that wireless and internet providers need to shore up their web experiences. There was a 25-point gap between apps and websites for wireless carriers, and an 11-point gap for internet service providers.

Overall, customer satisfaction was 654 out of 1,000 for wireless carriers and 659 for internet providers. Scores were based on four factors in order of importance: design, system performance, tools and capabilities, and information.

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Ranking among the wireless carriers, Mint Mobile got the highest score (704), with Spectrum Mobile coming next (678) and followed by a tie between Metro by T-Mobile and T-Mobile itself (672). It's worth noting that, of those, Spectrum is the only one not owned by T-Mobile.

For internet service providers, T-Mobile ranked the highest in the survey with a score of 695, followed by AT&T at 675 and Verizon at 669.