Try to answer two simple questions: How many mobile applications do you have on your mobile device and how many of them do you actually use on regular basis? The chances are you completely ignore every fifth app on your gadget. An interesting new research by Localytics has discovered that about 20% of all mobile applications downloaded on smartphones and tablet today are used just once… at the most!
Researchers reached to this conclusion after analyzing date from 25,000 mobile applications collected from 1.5 billion gadgets. What it found was that one in five apps are opened less than two times.
The most engaging applications, or at least those which are most useful, seem to be the ones dedicated to weather forecasts and social networks. Just one in 10 mobile users tends to abandon them. Health and fitness applications also enjoy high engagement rates, along with apps dedicated to music.
According to the study, the least interesting applications for smartphone and tablet PC owners are sports mobile apps or games. More than 20% of them are opened just once. Not much different is the case with photography and food & drink applications which end up being ignored by 21% of the people who have installed them on their gadgets.
This sounds highly concerning from the pointing of view for developers… but not really. The reason is that before this percentage was much higher, meaning that apps enjoyed an even lower engagement. Back in 2010, about 26% of all applications remained unused. This is an improvement of 6%, of which mobile developers would be more than thrilled.
Still, 20% is a big number. However, if we take into account the huge diversity of apps on today’s market, many of which are free, we would be able to see the logic behind this trend. Mobile users can easily download a series of applications with just one click, often without having to even pay for them. Moreover, most application stores do not allow users to test applications before installing them, with the exception of Amazon’s Appstore for Android. Therefore, the only way to see whether they like them or not is to directly download them on their gadgets. But in many of the cases users to do uninstall them simply because they tend to explore new applications on the go.
Another finding made by the report is that iOS apps tend to be ignored ore often compared to Android apps. According to analysts, this is due to the fact that the App Store offers iOS users a much greater choice and this oversupply leads to a greater discrepancy.
Apps which are more likely to be used only once:
- Sports (23%)
- Games (22%)
- Photography (21%)
- Food and drink (21%)
- News (20%)
- Entertainment (20%)
- Music (18%)
- Health and fitness *15%)
- Social networking (11%)
- Weather (9%)
