Localytics reported today that app retention rates are improving as mobile app developers and publishers have shifted their focus from downloads to customer acquisition and retention models. They stated that overall, the app industry has improved retention rates 19% over the last year.
Localytics states that “App publishers for the iPhone and iPad saw the greatest success, with retention rates 52% higher than those on Android.” Maybe most interesting is that the percentage of installed apps that were used more than ten times climbed by a solid 5% (from 26% to 31%).
iPhone has a clear advantage when it comes to retention. “iPhone’s far greater app retention rates is also an echo of the 94 percent retention rate of iPhone itself compared to 47 percent for Android,” the Localytics report states.
Clearly, a focus on creating quality mobile applications that are designed with good usability principles and are useful to users is paying dividends to mobile application developers and publishers.
Based on the most recent numbers from Nielson, half of US mobile service subscribers own a smartphone and each of those, on average, has 41 mobile apps on their device. This is a 28% increase over the previous year according to Nielson, so its pretty easy to see that there is some fantastic growth with regards to mobile application sales. Especially when you take into account the incredible growth in terms of the number of smartphones sold.
Another factor of this survey that stands out is by how much users prefer native mobile applications to html5 applications. Users will spend a great amount more time on a native app than they will on an html5 application. Clearly in most situations, building a native application is still the best choice for now. Nielson’s report also highlighted the incredible growth of this industry in terms of handsets. Right now there are a total of 84 million Android and iOS users in the US and that is more than double the number from just a year ago.
Studies like these tend to punctuate the need for businesses to address how they can leverage mobile apps or they will soon find themselves on the outside looking in. Well conceived and built mobile applications are regularly used by savvy consumers and provide a great way to access an audience that is often turned off by traditional media.
While no company wants to be know for selling products that are functional and unattractive, we are seeing strong evidence that aesthetics don’t affect a mobile app or web site’s perceived usability. But conversely, poor usability will negatively affect the application’s perceived allure.
In a recent study conducted by Google, they stated:
“The results showed that the beauty of the interface did not affect how users perceived the usability of the shops: Participants (or Users) were capable of distinguishing if a product was usable or not, no matter how nice it looked. However, the experiment showed that the usability of the shops influenced how users rated the products’ beauty. Participants using shops with bad usability rated the shops as less beautiful after using the shops. We showed that poor usability lead to frustration, which put the users in a bad mood and made them rate the product as less beautiful than before interacting with the shop.”
Often we see businesses acting counter to this with by placing aesthetics far ahead of usability. As they design, they often do everything to stand apart from other applications and focus too much on the surface level design factors while ignoring real usability issues that would help increase user satisfaction and repeat usage.
To counter this, we suggest users pursue design paths for mobile and web applications using aesthetic attributes such as “clean”, “tight” and “organized”. Applications generally gain traction from the ground up and add more users as positive word of mouth spreads, which means reputation is everything. The study suggests poor usability will lead to less than favorable word-of-mouth will good usability while help you see the growth you desire for your applications.