Android, iOS, mobile apps were used only once 26% of the time in 2010, analytics firm says
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Last year, 26% of apps on iPhones, iPads, Androids, BlackBerrys and Windows Phones were discarded after just one use, according to a study by a mobile app analytics firm.
‘The thing that grabs headlines is 26% of people throughout the year only use it once, but you could turn this around and look at this as 74% of people use an app more than once,’ said Brian Suthoff, vice president of market development at Localytics, the company that performed the study. ‘It’s actually very positive for developers. It shows that people are willing to try something out and test it and see if they like it on mobile devices.’
Localytics, a firm that sells real-time analysis data of app usage to mobile app developers, conducted its study using data from only its customers. It didn’t look at the usage rate of every app available -- which includes more than 400,000 iOS apps and more than 200,000 Android apps.
Suthoff declined to give an exact number of how many apps it looked at for the study, but said there were thousands.
The Boston-based company put out the study to help sell its own services, but also to question a bit the way the success of an app is measured, he said.
‘As an analytics company we think that focusing on understanding how people engage with your app over a longer period of time is more important than looking at just the number of downloads an app has,’ Suthoff said. ‘Developers need to figure out what type of people use their apps and how to attract those type of people for the first time and as returning users. Raw download numbers don’t tell the whole story.’
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles