New data from Flurry suggests that most iPhone and Android applications are disposable or perishable. Most people stop using them within a month and attrition continues to the point that withint two months, less than 15 percent of users still are using the downloaded apps.
That suggests a bias towards perishable content and entertainment or games. Few people watch "news" programming or read news articles more than once, for example.
Flurry tracks over 20,000 live applications and over two billion user sessions each month, and so far show either that "content is king" or that applications are becoming the dominant delivery mechanism for content, entertainment and tools on smartphones.
The most frequently-used downloaded apps are games, entertainment, social networking, news and other "lifestyle" apps.
Retention curves (the percentage of people using an app at varying times after download) for iPhone and Android applications were nearly identical. After just a month, 60 percent of people have stopped using the typical downloaded app.
That suggests a high degree of sampling. Users seem to be downloading and using many apps, but generally are not finding them sticky enough to continue using after two to three months.
That usage profile has not proven to be the case for some other foundational apps such as text messaging, social networking or email.
In some ways, app stores are becoming publishers of content in the same way newspapers, cable TV or the Web have been; "iTunes on steroids." That doesn't mean there is no room for other apps that prove more foundational. It just means we haven't created them, yet.
Friday, February 12, 2010
App Stores are "iTunes on Steroids"
Gary Kim has been a communications industry analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology. These days he especially studies changing business models and strategies.He speaks frequently at conferences and spends quite a lot of time organizing conferences and content as well.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
"Tokens" are the New "FLOPS," "MIPS" or "Gbps"
Modern computing has some virtually-universal reference metrics. For Gemini 1.5 and other large language models, tokens are a basic measure...
-
We have all repeatedly seen comparisons of equity value of hyperscale app providers compared to the value of connectivity providers, which s...
-
It really is surprising how often a Pareto distribution--the “80/20 rule--appears in business life, or in life, generally. Basically, the...
-
Who gets to use spectrum, and concerns about interference from other users, now appears to be an issue for Google’s Project Loon in India. ...
No comments:
Post a Comment