9 Tips To Avoid App Uninstall

Over two million apps compete to be on a mobile phone. And if your product isn’t good enough, it won’t last long enough on those devices. The truth is in the statistics:

• 75% of users uninstall an app within 90 days – DazeInfo
• Gaming apps have the highest uninstall rate across iOS and Android – Business Insider
• 24% of users abandon an app after one use – Localytics

The bottom line is that any app that doesn’t give users enough reason to keep using it is apt to be removed. As a product owner, you have everything, from a poor user experience, design, and performance, going against you.

So, how do you ensure that the users you have worked so hard to retain don’t end up removing your application from their devices? The key is to keep your product’s goals in mind, design for users’ needs, and focus on delivering a great user experience.

1. Monitor Critical Drop-off Points

There can be several reasons why users might be uninstalling your app. App metrics tell you “where” users are dropping off in your application, which can help you figure out why they are doing so and what you can do about it.

One of these metrics is churn rate. Analyzing where your users are churning the most and why they are doing so can help you overcome this problem. To do this, you can:

Monitor the onboarding process:

According to stats, the average app loses 77% of its active users within the first three days after installation. Most of the time, this is due to a poor onboarding.

Your app’s onboarding might either be confusing, too long or not informative enough to keep a user interested. User session recordings help you monitor user journeys and figure out why some visitors drop off at certain points while onboarding. Use an in-app analytics tool like Appsee to track user onboarding and improve it accordingly.

To illustrate, users might not have any problem providing social media details to sign up but they may hesitate to provide details that are more personal like their phone numbers to an application they have never heard of before. If user recordings show them dropping off when asked to provide such personal details to sign up, a text that reassures them that their info is secure (“We will not share your number with third parties”) may be of help.

Monitor post updates

Your updates might not suit your users. For example, if you own an ecommerce app, an update that has new shipping costs might cause users to abandon their shopping carts. To appease new and loyal users, you can introduce discounts on certain credit card transactions on your items. Marketing efforts to retain customers can help you when you have a clear and concrete reasoning.

2. Keep Updating For Improvements

Speaking of updates, it’s important now, more than ever to keep improving your application. Your product should not only be useful – it should be faster, free from glitches and must offer more than what other apps in the same niche offer. The best way to stop people from going over to the other side is to update regularly to appease users.

Popular applications update at least once a month with bug fixes, new features, or security updates. A lot of applications compete for the top spot so this isn’t surprising.

Start off by updating on a monthly basis after monitoring user behavior, identify any problems that occur after it, and add further necessary improvements or modifications in the next update.

3. Add Value in Notifications

Push notifications can be useful, however they can be annoying too, especially if they do not add any value. For example, consider daily reminders that keep badgering users to sign up for your newsletter.

The best alerts are those that offer value. To make your notifications strategy impart the best value:

Choose the right time of the day

No one likes their phones to beep in the middle of the night when they are asleep. Users will be more interested in what you have to say if you send alerts during certain times of day. For example, if you own a food ordering app, you can send alerts on discounted meal packages to consumers an hour before lunch time.

Keep notifications short

With attention spans dwindling as they are, app developers need to come up with innovative ways to engage users. To ensure that users actually read your alerts instead of swiping them away – keep them short. It works. Stats show that notifications which are 24 characters or less produce more conversions.

Personalize your messages

Customization makes users feel understood and makes your messages seem more relevant. In fact, studies have found that personalizing messages with attributes like purchase history and first name increase conversions by 27%.

4. Keep Privacy Concerns in Mind

Above all else, app users value privacy. It is why every application is required to have a privacy policy that tells users exactly how their private data is kept secure.

Unsecured applications can leak customer data without them knowing it. Consider native mobile applications where data is stored locally on devices and is more accessible to those with malicious intent.

To keep your mobile app secure, make it particularly sensitive to safeguarding customer data that someone is likely to steal, like credit card information and passwords. A good start is to ensure that the app doesn’t store these details on a user’s device. And if you need to store private information, make sure all data is encrypted.

5. Reduce Battery Consumption

If your application eats too much of a phone’s battery during use, it is going to be uninstalled eventually. The best way to ensure that this doesn’t happen is to:

• Test your app: The best way to know how fast your app drains battery is to test it. Run your app on a mobile phone and use all features simultaneously to see how long the power lasts. Investigate which operations are contributing to the drain and optimize accordingly.
• Postpone tasks: Deferring tasks for later can reduce battery consumption. Ask yourself, whether your app needs to perform certain actions right away. For example, can it wait till a device is charging before backing up data on the cloud?

6. Keep Ads Highly Relevant

In-app ads are great for a monetization strategy. But if they become too intrusive or reduce the quality of the UX (user experience), it can lead to uninstalls, especially if they don’t have much value to offer.

To illustrate, consider a game that displays ads every time a user completes a level. If the ad is totally unrelated to the gameplay (like an ad for a third party app) your users might get annoyed. A good strategy would be to present your users with ads that affect the app experience, like video ads that reward users if they watch it entirely. In fact, 58% of surveyed mobile game developers recommend this monetization strategy.

7. Focus on Quality

Grammar or spelling mistakes can make users question your app’s integrity. To ensure that your app stays on a user’s phone, it must exude quality. It must be a product that offers the best user experience. To deliver quality throughout the development process:

Focus a lot on user experience

A good app experience is intuitive, clear about its goals, and has no surprises in store for its users. A negative experience is anything that elicits unsatisfactory response from users.

Good app experiences are those that create the least amount of friction while delivering intuitive and anticipatory experiences.

Personalize the UX

Every user measures quality differently. So why should an application be a one-size-fits-all? To keep things interesting, customize the app experience by taking advantage of user data to give users a customized experience.

This can be seen in travel apps that use geolocation to present a user with relevant information that make their trips more convenient, like flights from the nearest airport to popular tourist destinations.

8. Segment your Audience to Gain Insight on Users’ Needs

Will older users get used to your app as easily as teenagers? How do your users want their information and at what time do they prefer it? Every person has different needs and so do the people you want to target with your app. To prevent them from uninstalling your app, segment your target audience and base your in-app experience accordingly. Here is a start:

Targeting bounced users

These might be users who have installed your app but may not be using it as regularly or at all. To ensure that they don’t remove your app, try to re-engage them with an ad retargeting strategy.

Targeting freemium users

In a bid to sell paid versions of their apps, developers usually offer a freemium or free version to give users a taste of what the paid versions of their products can do. Of course, since freemium products only offer limited features, users might uninstall it in time. But they might convert if you offer them incentives like turning advertisements off for paid versions or a free 30 day trial version of your priced packages.

9. Keep Content to a Minimum

When we use mobile applications, our comprehensive capabilities are impaired. And cluttering smaller screens with a lot of content will only confuse users more. Every added content, like a color, button or icon, increases the complexity of your app. And with attention spans as short as they are, not everyone may be patient enough to make sense of this complexity.

To avoid confusing users, app developers must focus their content on what is really important. For example, to keep focus on UI elements like call-to-action buttons, consider minimizing colors and use a single typeface throughout the interface.

Wrapping Up

At the end of the day, it’s the consumer that decides your app’s fate. Users are fickle. They are excited by applications and keep using them once they are launched, only to abandon or uninstall them when they get bored. Either that or your product isn’t as exciting or useful as the next one that comes up. Following these tips can keep your own app on the radar and ensure that it is as relevant and fresh as it launched.

For more insight into designing user centric apps, learn how to design amazing apps for kids.