A new report from mobile analytics company Adjust has been released, showing that Android users are more difficult to retain and more susceptible to fraudulent mobile apps. In fact, Android developers appear to have a harder time keeping users engaged overall. Android users tend to be much more active during the first several days of installing a new app but by around nineteen days in, they are using any given application approximately one time less per day than on Apple’s iOS. That number shoots up by several points by the end of the first full month. Apple developers also hold on to users at a higher rate by up to three-percent, despite that both app retention and engagement are up year-over-year. By day fourteen, only around thirteen-percent of users continue to use a given application. Travel applications only manage a retention rate of around seven-percent, which Adjust chalks up to the “cyclical” nature of vacation and travel. Conversely, utility apps manage to hold an average of 44-percent of users beyond the first day of installation and around a third of users through the 30-day mark.
With regard to other challenges faced by Android developers, it appears as though Google also has a lot of work to do over the next year. Although the company has released updates to its Google Play Store to fight malicious apps, the Android platform suffers a problem with fraudulent apps at around twice the rate of iOS. Adjust attributes that to several factors, including the comparative ease with which Android devices can be rooted and click-spamming. It also makes sense with consideration for how much more of the overall market share Android holds globally. Gaming apps were the most common but nearly twenty-percent of fraudulent apps caught by Adjust fell into the e-commerce category. Mobile ad fraud also played a big role, targetting primarily gaming applications.
Adjust’s measurements cover the tracking of over 11,000 applications around the globe between January 1 and December 31 of 2017, which includes information on 10.7 billion installations and 1.29 trillion “events” which correlate to app usage. Among other conclusions of the report, Google has a noticeable lead in terms of acting as the primary source of app downloads and that is expected to continue over the next year. That’s hardly surprising since Android is the number one mobile operating system on the planet by a substantial margin, with the Google Play Store being the world’s top app marketplace.