First Impressions Matter! 26% of Apps Downloaded in 2010 Were Used Just Once
The market for phone and tablet apps is very competitive, with about 400,000 iPhone/iPad apps and 200,000 Android apps. The good news is that customers seem very willing to give new apps a try …
Context & Ripple Effects
Localytics' first-pass data on 2010 downloads lands in an app economy that has scaled faster than its retention habits can absorb: roughly 400,000 iPhone/iPad apps and 200,000 Android apps now compete for shelf space, following the App Store build-out covered in A Bite of the Apple last September.
The headline number cuts both ways — customers are willing to try new apps in volume, yet a quarter of everything downloaded in 2010 was abandoned after a single session. That gap between trial and habit is becoming the industry's central measurement problem.
First-order effects
- Developers whose apps fall into that 26% get no second chance: acquisition spend aimed purely at driving downloads is wasted on users who never open the app again, making first-session design a direct revenue issue for every publisher on the two leading stores.
Second-order effects
- Analytics vendors like Localytics gain leverage, since publishers who can see where single-session drop-off happens will pay for session-level instrumentation; download-count charts stop being sufficient evidence of success for Apple and Google's developer ecosystems alike.
Third-order effects
- If trial-without-retention stays this common at 600,000 combined titles, the industry's success metric migrates from downloads to repeat usage — favoring apps that earn habitual opens and squeezing long-tail publishers who cannot fund ongoing engagement work.
The trend: The mobile app economy is shifting its unit of value from downloads won to engagement retained, as store scale outpaces any individual app's ability to hold attention.