What makes mobile retention so difficult | Hacker News Reader

What makes mobile retention so difficult

thetechblock.com

12 pointsthejad4 comments

The first two points of this write-up are largely invalid.

1. Mobile devs. don't know where their downloads come from

Every single large/popular ad network that I've dealt with has a conversion and download tracking system in place. A user clicks on a banner or some other media link to the App Store/Google Play, passing one of many unique identifiers (udid, device id, idfa, device finger printing). If that same user downloads and opens the app, the app makes an API call to the ad network with the same device identifier and BOOM, you've tracked a download. This is mobile marketing 101. It's a little trickier recently because of the move from UDID to IDFA on iOS, but still quite effective at tracking the acquisition process and value of mobile campaigns, and nothing has change on Android. Does she think companies are just throwing money at ad campaigns without tracking their success??

In addition to the aforementioned standard ad-network practices, Google Play and Android allow you to specify a referrer in a URL to Google Play, which is then passed to your application if it ends up getting downloaded, which the Google Analytics SDK will then pass to Google Analytics. Funny, she shows the referral section as something that isn't available on mobile - this is the exact screen that gets populated with Google Play referral data.

2. Mobile developers don't know when their apps are deleted

The Google Play developer console tells you how many uninstalls you get per day, along with how many active installs you have. It's quite useful in tracking overall trends in engagement and retention of users.

For iOS or if you want something more precise for Android, the respective push notification services (APNS and GCM) both allow (and in fact, encourage), you to use their APIs that expose exactly which push token/devices have your application installed.

If neither of the above work for your app, plenty of analytics toolkits (Google Analytics, Localytics, Flurry) are there to give you engagement data. Hell, on Android you can have your app start on boot and ping your server if you really wanted to see if it's still installed.

"Reasons far out of any developer's control"? Hardly!

Are there any companies offering solutions to this problem?

Unfortunately, the solution can only be offered by Apple and Google, since they are the only ones with the data. This is one of the big problems with a walled garden approach - neither you nor your users really control your software. Another big problem is discoverability - Apple and Google basically control who is and is not discoverable on their platforms. There is no doubt that apps/developers in their favor (genuinely or otherwise...) have a far higher chance to be featured than others, creating an unfortunate effect.

For example, if Microsoft released an Android app, there is no way Google would ever place it in their featured apps list.

this article brings a great point that is beginning to be noticeable by many users, and unfortunately, it's not addressed as much as it needs to be.

Great article.

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