Airship global mobile apps study: businesses send 36 notifications per user per month on average, up 18.4% since last year, 67% of users opt in to notifications
Greg Sterling / Marketing Land :
Context & Ripple Effects
Airship's study lands in a long-running measurement arc: since Flurry's 76% app-usage growth in 2014 through App Annie's pandemic-era records of 200B+ monthly hours in apps, engagement has concentrated inside apps rather than the mobile web, which draws more visitors but far less time. Push notifications are how businesses convert that captive time into repeat visits.
The new numbers cut both ways: senders pushed volume up 18.4% year-over-year to 36 notifications per user per month, yet 67% of users still grant opt-in — meaning the channel still works, but each incremental message spends down a finite stock of user tolerance.
First-order effects
- Businesses' mobile marketing teams now run on higher notification cadence, making segmentation and send-time discipline the immediate operational challenge as volume rises faster than opt-in can absorb indefinitely.
Second-order effects
- Users who hit notification fatigue don't just silence one app — they lower future opt-in rates across categories, forcing every sender to compete against the worst offender in a user's notification tray; OS-level notification controls become the real chokepoint.
Third-order effects
- If send volumes keep climbing while opt-in stays near two-thirds, expect platforms to harden default notification settings and regulators to treat push as a personal-data surface — echoing the earlier finding that popular apps transmit email and location data to third parties (the 2015 privacy survey) — shifting power over reach from senders to gatekeepers.
The trend: Mobile engagement keeps concentrating in apps, and push notifications are becoming the primary re-engagement lever whose rising volume tests both user tolerance and platform control over the channel.