According to the findings of a new report today Localytics, there’s good news worth celebrating in the mobile app market. As it turns out, app retention rates are improving as app publishers shift from an early focus on “downloads” to more mature customer acquisition and retention models.
“The overall app industry improved retention rates 19% over the last year,” writes Daniel Ruby on the Localytics Blog. “App publishers for the iPhone and iPad saw the greatest success, with retention rates 52% higher than those on Android.”
In 2011, for example, 26 percent of downloaded apps didn’t see much use. In fact, they were only used once. During the last year, that percentage has fallen to 22 percent. Perhaps more importantly, however, is that the percentage of installed apps used more than 10 times climbed five percent (from 26% to 31%).
So who’s the biggest winner among platforms in the app retention war?
“iPhone’s far greater app retention rates is also an echo of the 94 percent retention rate of iPhone itself compared to 47 percent for Android,” the Localytics report reads. “When users upgrade from iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4S, they might download the same apps (or transfer them) to their new device. In most cases, that iPhone 4S will look ‘new’ to the app publisher even though the user might have months of prior exposure to the app on the older iPhone 3GS. To correctly identifying returning users across devices, publishers need to record registration data as part of their app analytics.”
To check out the report in full, click here.
