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The "Crash and Burn" Report Findings

Andrew Levy

The correlation between mobile app crashes and increasing churn rates (or declining user retention) has long been suspected. In the report, titled Crash and Churn, Apteligent set out to understand the impact of per user crash rate on churn, using both approaches to the definition of churn. Whereas an app's crash rate is the total number of crashes divided by number of app loads, the analysis employed a per user crash rate to allow us to consider the segments of the population experiencing that issue.

The report contains many key takeaways for digital marketers, product managers, and mobile development teams:

Crashes can increase churn by as much as 534 percent

This represents a six-times increase from your "average" churn rate. The report found a more accurate depiction of crash and churn relation when viewed through Android devices over IOS. IOS displays a lower churn rate compared to Android, but, due to the platform design, users cannot send a crash report until the next time a user opens the app. And, in some cases, the user could use the app, the app crashes and that user may never go back to that app again so, that crash won't be counted as a churn cause.

Crashes have a significant impact on next day app opens by as much as 8x the normal rate

The report calculates how likely a user would be to return the day following a crash taking into consideration that 1.8 percent of users don't return to an app the next day even after a crash-free experience. As the per user crash rate approaches 100 percent, the churn rate increases to almost 15 percent. Again, IOS limitations led us to believe that Android had more accurate data.

Less engaged users, or users with lower app opens per day, tend to churn at higher rates based on crashes

The fewer apps a user engages with, the more sensitive they are to crashes, increasing their churn rate. The report notes that as crashes per day increase, we see a steady stream of churning users, especially those that load an app ten times or fewer per day. Perhaps one of the most interesting behaviors discovered was that the inverse of this is true as well. The more a user uses an app, the more resilient they become with crashes.

The impact of crashes on churn also varies by app store category

Shopping and finance apps, the most revenue-critical, were particularly vulnerable to crashes causing increased churn rates, while games and travel were much more resilient. While the data proves the aforementioned to be true, we cannot prove why users of games and travel are more forgiving of app crashes. We can only speculate that games and travel apps crashing may not be be enough to sway users away from addictive games or travel necessities, regardless of frustration with the experience.

For app owners, the report underscores the immediate return on investment that comes with applying the right resources to app performance. There are immediate and medium term revenue losses associated with churning app users and customers. In addition, the cost of acquiring new users is much higher than those associated with retaining existing users.

In 2017, the organizations who win on mobile will be those that select vendors applying proven data science techniques to big data collection. Data, without insights, is noise.

Andrew Levy is Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Apteligent.

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The "Crash and Burn" Report Findings

Andrew Levy

The correlation between mobile app crashes and increasing churn rates (or declining user retention) has long been suspected. In the report, titled Crash and Churn, Apteligent set out to understand the impact of per user crash rate on churn, using both approaches to the definition of churn. Whereas an app's crash rate is the total number of crashes divided by number of app loads, the analysis employed a per user crash rate to allow us to consider the segments of the population experiencing that issue.

The report contains many key takeaways for digital marketers, product managers, and mobile development teams:

Crashes can increase churn by as much as 534 percent

This represents a six-times increase from your "average" churn rate. The report found a more accurate depiction of crash and churn relation when viewed through Android devices over IOS. IOS displays a lower churn rate compared to Android, but, due to the platform design, users cannot send a crash report until the next time a user opens the app. And, in some cases, the user could use the app, the app crashes and that user may never go back to that app again so, that crash won't be counted as a churn cause.

Crashes have a significant impact on next day app opens by as much as 8x the normal rate

The report calculates how likely a user would be to return the day following a crash taking into consideration that 1.8 percent of users don't return to an app the next day even after a crash-free experience. As the per user crash rate approaches 100 percent, the churn rate increases to almost 15 percent. Again, IOS limitations led us to believe that Android had more accurate data.

Less engaged users, or users with lower app opens per day, tend to churn at higher rates based on crashes

The fewer apps a user engages with, the more sensitive they are to crashes, increasing their churn rate. The report notes that as crashes per day increase, we see a steady stream of churning users, especially those that load an app ten times or fewer per day. Perhaps one of the most interesting behaviors discovered was that the inverse of this is true as well. The more a user uses an app, the more resilient they become with crashes.

The impact of crashes on churn also varies by app store category

Shopping and finance apps, the most revenue-critical, were particularly vulnerable to crashes causing increased churn rates, while games and travel were much more resilient. While the data proves the aforementioned to be true, we cannot prove why users of games and travel are more forgiving of app crashes. We can only speculate that games and travel apps crashing may not be be enough to sway users away from addictive games or travel necessities, regardless of frustration with the experience.

For app owners, the report underscores the immediate return on investment that comes with applying the right resources to app performance. There are immediate and medium term revenue losses associated with churning app users and customers. In addition, the cost of acquiring new users is much higher than those associated with retaining existing users.

In 2017, the organizations who win on mobile will be those that select vendors applying proven data science techniques to big data collection. Data, without insights, is noise.

Andrew Levy is Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Apteligent.

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The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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