“The percentage of users who abandon an app after one use is now 23%, a slight improvement from the 25% we saw in 2015,” Caitlin O’Connell reports for Localytics. “But clearly, with about one in four users still only using an app once, not enough has been done to match what consumers want and restore apps to the success of just a few years ago.”
“With that in mind, today we are releasing an annual update to our app user retention study, which measures loyalty and abandonment across our user base of 37,000 apps. Five years in, we have a solid understanding of what user retention should look like as well as the factors that can cause it to fluctuate,” O’Connell reports. “In the study, we also found that user retention recovered from 34% in 2015, a dip of 5 percentage points from the previous year, to reach 38% in 2016. While this number is also an improvement, there is still work to be done in order to avoid churn and ultimately convert more users to loyal customers. Because even though 38% will return to an app 11 or more times, that means a whopping 62% will use an app less than 11 times. This is not a sustainable business model.”
“iOS user retention improves to 36%. One of the causes behind the change this year is improvement in user retention for iOS apps. The percentage of iOS users only opening an app once fell from 26% to 24%. The percentage of iOS users returning to an app 11 or more times increased from 32% to 36%,” O’Connell reports. “One potential reason for this could be the advancements made to the overall app experience on iOS devices. From multitasking to split screen to allowing notifications to be presented in chronological order versus grouping them by app, Apple has had a focus on improving the way consumers engage with their favorite apps.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Some apps you have to download and try to see how they work (for example, with Apple Watch) and what they offer. Anecdotally, this make sense to use since about one in four apps that we try only get run once before we delete them because they didn’t work as we needed or expected.