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App Store Users: The Good, The Bad and The Quitters.

Posted on 28. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Mobile Stores

Another App Store Day is on us. With lots of numbers to dive into.

According to Apple’s official press release, 2 billion apps have been downloaded in just over a year. Itunes took 6 years to sell 8.5 billion songs.
But….
-$0.99 is not $0.00.
-Buying a song is a conscious act- you really want it, you want to listen to it over time, you want it on your Ipod. Apps are an impulse driven “purchase”.
-Many apps come with the price tag $0, which makes the impulse of downloading even more irresistible.

But one more set of data has made the news today. This time it comes from Flurry, a mobile analytics and monetization tools start-up in San Francisco, and it’s a study on the behavior of users who download apps and their churn rate.
For the purpose of the report, Flurry used a sample of 2,000 apps and 200 million user sessions on the IPhone and iPod touch, Google Android, Blackberry, and J2ME platforms.
Apps were grouped into 19 categories and their use was monitored within 30, 60 and 90 days.

The Good:

1) The apps in the News and Reference category, Quadrant I, which are used more than once a day, at a rate of 11 times per week.

2) A little less good, but still not bad, the apps from the Productivity, Social Networking and Utilities categories, in Quadrant IV, which have  a less intense usage over time, but still a loyal customer base.

The Bad:

The apps in Quadrant III, the IQ Test and Ringtones of the case, which gets abandoned right after the download. No surprise here.

The Quitters:

Apps from the categories Games and Books  in Quadrant II, which generate the most downloads across the different stores and are used very often, but over a very limited and finite timeframe. In other words, a very “disposable” user experience, which might only account for a one-off fee business model, as opposed to subscription or ad-supported models for the categories in Quadrant I and IV.

No one will be surprised by this data. But if you’re planning to build an app, getting noticed among almost 80,000 other apps is not going to be your only challenge.

Tags: App Store