Purchasing a shiny new Smartphone comes with the option to install a bunch of shiny new apps and while users are purchasing those apps at a rate of billions of dollars each year they often skimp out when it comes to actually operating them.
According to a recent Pew Researcher Center study 68% of Smartphone users use five or fewer apps on a weekly basis while 17% of users say they don’t access their installed apps at all.
One analyst tells USA Today that 80% to 90% of apps that are downloaded will eventually be deleted because of a lack of use. That means to have a successful long-term app a develop only needs to have a 30% retention rate.
It’s not all bad news for mobile app developers . It turns out that apps users want to use on the Google Android platform take up a lot of their time, up to 60 minutes each day with an average phone use time of 90 minutes. The research found very similar results for Apple iPhone users.
While quick downloading and dumping of mobile apps is common it’s not necessarily a bad thing since one in five apps on the Top 50 download list each month is new, allowing for more exposure for developers who are fighting for space in an overcrowded arena that features more than 1 million apps among the world’s top four mobile operating systems.
Do you find yourself downloading many apps but then deleting most of them after little or no use?
