The Biggest Problem in Mobile: Retention | Hacker News Reader

The Biggest Problem in Mobile: Retention

cristinajcordova.com

51 pointsssclafani9 comments

There are two kinds of apps: entertainment and utility. Retention is not a problem on the latter, almost by definition impossible with the former. How many movies would you watch every day of your life?

The mobile world actually likes churn, it means that you can sell the same spot to the same user over and over again.

Retention is definitely not the main problem in mobile. It may be in social stuff (ex. the games referred in the article) but that has nothing to do with mobile. Retention in social stuff is a big problem.

In mobile the main problem is discovery. There are so many apps on each market, and the ways to find one are much more limited then a web app.

I agree that retention is a key metric in a time when everyone is talking about growth. Retention isn't going to be sustainable for apps that aren't core utilities. The biggest problem in mobile is the amount of resources invested in developing apps that just clearly aren't core utilities.

Photos (Instagram), messaging (SMS, Beluga, Twitter, etc.), voice, maps (Foursquare?), email, web browsing (Chrome), and music (Rdio, Spotify, Pandora, etc.) are the only core utilities right now in my view. Notice the omission of video (too early) and games (trends and time wasters).

The only exception I can think of is Uber, an episodic utility that is doing very well. I'm sure there are others.

http://cdixon.org/2012/05/21/four-use-cases-for-mobile-apps/

I don't think it is a problem that is harder on mobile than web, it is just that up till now for mobile we have only focused on downloads: downloads is the main metric for iTunes Store and Google Play to rank apps and to get into a top 25.

I totally agree that this is a stupid metric and we should move to monthly active users, both for general measurement of success as well as ranking in app stores. Getting a lot of one time visitors on your web site is not hard, monthly recurring visitors is. No different on mobile, let's start dealing with the challenge of engagement on mobile as well.

But even 'monthly active users' is a very stretchable metric. For one app it is defined as 'user opened the app', for another app it is defined as 'user interacted with the app' and for a third it is defined as 'user communicated using the app'.

Depending on which of the three you use you're going to end up getting wildly different figures from different kinds of apps.

Mobile metrics are like web metrics back in the day when 'hits' were the normal way of expressing how popular a website was.

Churn figures have similar problems, as do customer lifetime value (which you can only properly establish at the end of a cycle) and various other metrics.

Some standardization and common sense would go a long way to making the mobile world more transparent but as long as there are fortunes made based on opaqueness this is not likely to change.

The apps that are actually useful I keep using, not even bothering to try and find a better app for that task because of laziness.

The toy apps that I download because of marketing or curiosity or as a diversion? My usage fades quickly.

Is it a surprise to anyone that hucksters have a problem with customer retention?

Andrew Chen covered this phenomena on his recent When does high growth not imply product/market fit?[1]

[1] http://andrewchen.co/2012/06/20/quora-when-does-high-growth-...

Perhaps there's a tiny little possibility that only a small fraction of mobile apps are actually good, useful and continuously create new value.

I'm sure retention isn't a problem for them but on the other hand, most of that stuff tends to come bundled with the phone OS already these days.

This is a big issue. Annuity != Perpetuity. Its much harder to build the latter.

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