Apple has announced that its App Store has now generated more than three billion downloads. News flying around about the partnership of Comscore and Flurry has brought something quite alarming into the open; iPhone and Android Applications for many organisations actually today represent a very poor investment.

Why? Retention of users to iPhone and Android applications appears to be far worse than many would expect – many seemingly don’t get far past the 30 day or one month mark. In the stats published by Flurry, after 2 months an average of just 32% of applications are still being used, after 3 months just 25%. The worst performing category is listed as ‘lifestyle’ with a retention rate of just 5% after 3 months. (See table below).

This really should not be the case. It raises some serious issues. Clearly many are failing to recognise the ‘mobile’ element of the service offering; understand the core principles of mobile and dynamics of digital. Services are being brought to the market with no strategic view towards evolution and ongoing consumer engagement.

For the organisations that we support this level of consumer retention would simply not be acceptable. Organisations typically spending 000′s of dollars on services wish to see a level of return on their investment. For most these returns will not be delivered in days, but weeks and years. Many want to establish sustainable business models, not here today gone tomorrow plays.

Flurry collects mobile application data from approximately two out of every three iPhone and Android devices. Each month, the company aggregates application usage data from over 1 billion end-user sessions across more than 50 million unique handsets from more than 200 countries. Over 10,000 developers have chosen to integrate Flurry Analytics within their applications.

A releated post: Mobile strategy – iPhone should factor but certainly not dominate.