iPhone users have very short attention spans: Study

23 February 2009

Only 30 per cent of people who buy an iPhone application actually use it the day after it was purchased, according to Pinch Media, a New York-based startup that provides iPhone developers with analytics on their applications.

Only about 20 per cent of people who download a free application were using it the next day, the research firm found. Paid applications fared slightly better with nearly 30 per cent of people still using the download. And after 90 days, the percentage of people using downloads hovers around 1 per cent.

The findings were based on the monitoring of more than 30 million downloads.

Those are amasing numbers. It is not a new pattern, but back then, with the App Store just a month old, it was hard to know whether that usage model would last, it noted.

Now it is clear that seven months, 15,000 applications, and 500 million downloads later, things have not changed. App Store activity continues to be huge; Apple has made the App Store the centerpiece of its iPhone marketing over the past few months, highlighting the breadth and depth of applications that are available on the App Store for business and entertainment.

According to Pinch Media CEO Greg Yardley, Apple has built such an easy-to-use distribution (as well as payment processing) platform for iPhone applications that people find it very easy to move onto the next thing that catches their fancy. The lack of a 'try-before-you-buy' feature means iPhone users have no choice but to take the plunge, and given that most iPhone applications are free and the ones that do cost money are very inexpensive, there is little incentive to carefully shop around for the one application that best meets your needs.