The half-life of an iPhone app
As of Friday morning, according to 148Apps, there were 22,235 applications on Apple's (AAPL) iTunes App Store competing furiously with one another for the attention of anybody with an iPhone or an iPod touch.
But once they have that attention, how long does it last?
The question is important to developers trying to decide whether to put a price tag on their app or give it away and make money selling ads.
The answer, it turns out, is a matter of minutes.
In a slide show packed with hard-won insights, Jesse Rohland and Greg Yardley of Pinch Media offer the results of a statistical analysis of 30 million App Store downloads. Among their findings:
- Users tire of applications pretty quickly; fewer than 20% ever come back to run a free app the day after download.
- Time spent on any app declines by almost 1/3 in the first month, stabilizing at just under five minutes.
- Paid applications see slightly more use than free apps and are used for slightly longer periods.
- The biggest usage differentiator is category — games are used for longer periods than any other type of application.
Behind these general observations are some very useful stats:
- Appearing on the top 100 list increases daily new users 2.3 times.
- The average price cut increases demand by 130%
- The average price increase drops demand by 25%
Bottom line: only a few of the stickiest applications — less than 5% — are suitable for advertising at the current ad rates, and a developer won't know if he or she has got one until after launch.
The slide show was presented Wednesday evening at the New York iPhone Developers Meetup and is published here. It's must reading for any App Store developer.
For more analysis of the findings, see AppleInsider and TechCrunch.
Luckily for Apple they now have over 15,000 "apps" and add more every week or there would be some seriously bored users asking themselves:
"Now what am I paying close to $90 a month for 2 years for"?
I find myself using the same 10-15 apps and for all the ones I "sample" rarely find anything worth keeping.
Duh, of course.
Of course, there are apps (preferably free ones) that you use once, decide it is junk, and never use again.
But even for those apps that you continue to use, the usage will go down over time. For when you use something for the first time, you spend time learning it, exploring it. Once you know what it can do, you put it aside and use it only when you need it. So of course, usage goes down.
Full disclosure… I work for Flurry, a free iPhone (android, blackberry and java me) analytics provider. The validation that games and applications are used for 30 seconds on average is great. Having been in product marketing and management for the last 5+ years (three running product marketing at mobile game maker Digital Chocolate), we knew this about consumers. And if we think about 15,000 app on iPhone, we know that a lot of the stuff out there is crap. So the real mission, in our mind, is to help application and game developers increase the length and frequency of usage. That's where analytics is really powerful and help drive a roadmap. Whether developers look at Pinch or Flurry or someone else, we believe this is a must have tool to become competitive in the App Store.
I am developing an app for Blood Donors and Blood Finders. Blood donors will be registering themselves as Donors. People who are looking for a particular group of blood in particular area will be able to search and contact the donors.
Blood donors will be able to register for free and blood finders will pay few dollars to find the donors.
Request your opinion on this.
Thanks
I guess the question still remaining for me is, does use curtail because the kind of person most likely to download an app is more excited by the "new toy" aspect than actually using it, or because once downloaded most users find them relatively useless?
The first reason would suggest a need to churn shiny new objects out as fast as possible, while the latter would be a call for spending more time and money building better tools. Much different strategies for much different clients.
I think the study just confirms what the real world has assumed all along, and Apple has deliberately designed:
1) iPhone apps are supposed to be clear, easy, and to the point.
2) You use an app only when you need it
3) No one wants to see an Ad on an iPhone, not even via a free App. It is a tool, a device, not just for leisure, but critical use in the customers hands.
Advertisers and marketers live in some sort of calculated dream world. Go away.
You know, there's some guy that's been adding "apps" to the iPhone that are nothing more than free e-books repackaged in his reader. I've seen at least a couple dozen of those, and I suspect there are maybe more than a hundred.
Those books are available for free from Project Gutenberg, and there are other free readers out there that can access the entire library. This "company" is obviously ripping the free literature off and repackaging it for the purposes of trying to make money with no investment. I guess that's just business though, a percentage of the "apps" for the iPhone are nothing more than "window dressing."
I have an iPhone and an iPOD Touch and I have downloaded about 100 apps. However, not all read my phone and my iPOD. After a while, I realized that I would have way too many apps on my phone and I realized that I only wanted stuff that I know I would use or will want. I peruse the app store almost daily and comb through to see what is hot and what is new and what may be useful. I pay attention to what my needs are and what is missing and look to see if there is an app that can cover it. After I download, I spend a good amount of time looking over the app and see if what its about. I usually have apps on my phone for two to three weeks. I pay attention to how much I use it and see in real time if it is something that I think I want. If I don't like it or don't think I'll use it over time, I delete it from my phone. For my iPod Touch, it relies on wifi and is limited to usually games and stuff that doesn't require a server. I don't want to get frustrated with the lack of connectivity. There are mostly games on this and other various apps that aren't necessarily on my phone. Maybe one or two are on both. I'd say 5% of my apps are paid for. I have a hard time paying for something (even 99 cents) that I can't try out or don't know much about. I usually am pretty prudent about it. I read several blogs to see what is out there and see if my friends have used it or heard about it. It can get very easy to spend a lot of money quickly. There should be a better way to learn more about paid apps then we currently have.