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March 16th, 3:44am 0 comments

How Addictive Does Your Mobile App Need to Be?

According to a Techcrunch article, for the average mobile app on iPhone, Android, Blackberry:

  • 26% of downloaders will use it once and never open it again
  • 26% of downloaders will use it 10 times or more


Here's the full graph:

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The graph shows what percentage of users open the app exactly that many times and no more. For practical purposes it's more useful to think how many users open the app AT LEAST THIS MANY TIMES. In other words, you know that 100% of users open the app at least once -- otherwise they're not users at all. 26% of them don't open it ever again, which means that 74% of them DO open it again.

This graph shows how addicitve the average mobile app is:

Moz-screenshot-72

74% of users use it a second time
61% use it a third time
52% use it a fourth time

... and so on. If you're app doesn't have about 50% of users opening it at least 5 times then you're barely beating the average. And you really can't expect to make much from IAP because your app just isn't very sticky.

Maths nerds might notice that the Techcrunch graph follows Zipf's law. Zipf's law states that for any ranked list, the most common item will always be twice as common as the 2nd item, 3 times as popular as the third, and so on. So given that 26% of users only use an app once, Zipf could guess that 13% would use it twice, 9% would use it 3 times, and so on. In fact, here's a comparison between the data gathered at great expense by Localytics and quoted in Techcrunch, and the Zipf law prediction:

Moz-screenshot-74

Clever, eh?

Posted by David Barnes