The Great App Con

The fact that most people have a hundred apps on their phone and use only six of them should be a clue. Take a look at your own phone how many apps do you have on your iPhone two pages, three pages? How many of those apps do you ever actually use? Not too many, right?

According to research for most people, the answer is about 6 out of the 100 plus they have on their phones. If the app even stays on their phone, 29.1% of Android phone users downloaded apps and allowed them to remain on their phones for about a day. The number is a bit higher for users of iOS-based devices, at 25.5%. Checking the retention after a 30-day period, only 3.2% of iOS apps and 3.3% of Android apps were still actively used.

The chances that your business is going to significantly improve its marketing by having an app are about the same as your business is going to improve by you buying a hundred lottery tickets tonight. In fact, the chances may be higher if you do. The resources are better spent somewhere else.

Now the app salesman is to going to tell you that the best thing about having an app is that you can push notices to users. You can even set up Geo-fencing, which triggers notices when the customer is in the area, which I’ll admit sounds sexy. Of course, you can also push notices to your customers by text. You can push notices to your customers by email. You can push notices to…