Mobile Developers Must Engage And Retain Users Quickly, Says Swrve's Latest App Report

Mobile marketing firm Swrve has published data on how users interact with the applications on their smartphones. The average retention rate shows 26% of users returning to an app for a second time within a forty-eight hours of first opening the app, although over a third of activity with a mobile app lasts less than one minute.Gathered during May 2014 through data collected by Swrve’s marketing platform, and the data in this survey covers “over fifty applications, with tens of millions of users and billions of mobile events.”

Looking first of all at the retention data, Swrve starts the clock as an app is opened for the first time. Previous data suggests that straight away, twenty-four percent of those who installed the app are not coming back at all. Of the rest, roughly another quarter will be back the next day (within 24-48 hours of the first session), and after seven days the retention rate drops to 13%.