New Delhi: These days, everybody seems to have a fancy smartphone; however, it does not mean that everyone's downloading apps.
Each month, 65.5 per cent of U.S. smartphone owners refrain from downloading any new apps, a report by Internet analytics firm ComScore said.
The report says only about one-third of smartphone owners download any apps in an average month, with the bulk of those downloading one to three apps. The top 7 per cent of smartphone owners account for “nearly half of all download activity in a given month,” the report adds.
It is not that apps aren't useful as more than half of US smartphone users accessed apps every single day, and it is also not about app pricing since most of the apps are free.
One possible explanation is that people are selective in their choices as the apps they already have are more than suitable for most functions.
Another reason for lack of downloads is that smartphone owners tend to spend 42 per cent of their usage time on their favorite app and 17% of their time on their second-ranked app, meaning they get most of the function they need from their top apps.
New apps come and go, especially games, but perhaps breakthrough apps will be increasingly rare, the report added. A look at the top 25 most-used apps reflects mostly mature companies, including Facebook, Google, Pandora, and Yahoo.
Another possible explanation is lousy discovery feature in Apple's App Store. Here users rely heavily on top-25 lists, a bad search engine, and few editorial features. It makes it pretty difficult for people to reach out to new apps.
