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The Lifecycle of a Mobile App, a User's Perspective

Michael Griffith writes that the average user doesn't open a mobile app more than twenty times, and people use only one third of the apps they download beyond 30 days. As an app designer, he finds this depressing. It means much of his hard work gets discarded. This got him thinking about the lifecycle of an app living on my phone.

Purchasing apps is very different from making most purchases. When shopping for a hammer, I can go into a physical store, pick up the hammer, examine its grip and head, and even swing it to get a feel for its balance. Shopping for an app involves a certain amount of blind faith. Neither the Apple App Store nor the Android Market provides any way of trying out an app before purchasing it. Amazon does allow Test Drives in a browser-based emulator for some apps, but an emulator experience is a far cry from the actual device experience. Building a great app experience may not result in a download, so it's important that the app store experience be a designed experience.

The Lifecycle of a Mobile App, a User's Perspective. Via Smallsurfaces.

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