Short Shelf Life for Most Apps

1 out of 4 smartphone apps is used only once according to a study by Localytics. To be precise, 26% of all apps are downloaded and used only once before being ignored or deleted. While paid apps can be expected to be less disposable than the free ones, this is still an enormously high rejection rate. Also, how many apps only get used twice, or only five or ten times, before being dumped?

So far, there doesn’t appear to be a significant difference in the discard rate by platform. Even though there are many more iPhone apps than Android or others, the discard rate for all is high. This will be an interesting situation to monitor moving forward. In the US, smartphone usage grew from 42.7 million in November of 2009 to 61.5 million in November 2010.