Getting people to download your app is the easy part (relatively speaking), it’s getting them to continue using it that’s difficult. This is according to an analyst by the name of Andrew Chen, who recently published an article to his website claiming that most people stop using an app within three days of downloading it, and nearly all of them stop using it within three months. Chen’s findings are based on data from more than 125 million smartphones, and he goes into detail about the reasons for this low retention rate, as well as how to prevent your app from losing users, so if you’re an app developer, his article is definitely worth checking out.
Nobody’s really arguing anymore over whether the future will be mobile. Apps have become one of the primary ways we engage ideas, each other, and the world around us. This trend is only expected to increase in the future, so right now app development is as hot as the surface of the sun and getting hotter every day. However, to say competition is fierce in the app world is a massive understatement. In an article published on his website, Silicon Valley analyst Andrew Chen attests that the average app loses 77 percent of its users in the three days after they install it. After a month, 90 percent of users eventually stop using the app, and by the 90-day mark, only 5 percent of users continue using a given app. These crushing figures mean that app creators are having to make sure that their users stay connected (but not annoyed by) their apps from minute one to three months down the line. Chen draws his data from over 125M mobile phones, and the apps he studied were all available from the Google Play Store and had over 10,000 downloads. He excluded Google’s apps for the purpose of this study.
