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Understanding the Impact of Mobile App Crashes

Andrew Levy

Crittercism's new report, Extending the Mobile Enterprise, created with analyst partner Tony Rizzo of Blue Hill Research, evaluates global audience demographics including age group, as well as measuring the end-user impact of app crashes, app misbehavior, and feature gaps within apps.

“All age groups have very little tolerance for a glitch-ridden app – especially one that crashes,” said Tony Rizzo, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Blue Hill. “If an app’s performance is substandard, consumers have no compunction about uninstalling it and moving on to a competitor’s app. Retailers need to take note: if their mobile app doesn’t offer a seamless user experience, they will quickly lose a key retail demographic. Bottom line losses aside, they’ll also take a reputational hit.”

Key findings of the report include:

■ 60 to 65 percent of millennials and nearly 60 percent of Gen X users report using mobile apps to perform a large portion (between 25 and 50 percent) of shopping and product research.

■ By January 2017, following the completion of the 2016 holiday shopping season, more users will be shopping via mobile 50 percent of the time.

■ Mobile-driven “anytime, anywhere” interactions greatly up the ante for capturing the millennial demographic.

■ When an Android mobile app has an average daily crash rate of 0.25 percent crashes per day, Android users are enormously tolerant. As the daily crash rate doubles to 0.5 per day, well over a third of Android users will still not abandon the app.

■ For apps categorized in the Apple App Store as Lifestyle and Shopping Apps, the abandonment rate rises less severely as app crash rate averages go from 0.25 to 0.75.

“Aside from a few pioneers, most retailers, including retail banks with consumer customers, have not yet begun thinking out their mobile strategies, said Dave Robbins, CEO of Crittercism. “Retailers need a thorough understanding of uncontrollable external mobile variables, how they interact, how they behave short term and long term, and how these variables correlate with the retail marketplace.”

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

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Understanding the Impact of Mobile App Crashes

Andrew Levy

Crittercism's new report, Extending the Mobile Enterprise, created with analyst partner Tony Rizzo of Blue Hill Research, evaluates global audience demographics including age group, as well as measuring the end-user impact of app crashes, app misbehavior, and feature gaps within apps.

“All age groups have very little tolerance for a glitch-ridden app – especially one that crashes,” said Tony Rizzo, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Blue Hill. “If an app’s performance is substandard, consumers have no compunction about uninstalling it and moving on to a competitor’s app. Retailers need to take note: if their mobile app doesn’t offer a seamless user experience, they will quickly lose a key retail demographic. Bottom line losses aside, they’ll also take a reputational hit.”

Key findings of the report include:

■ 60 to 65 percent of millennials and nearly 60 percent of Gen X users report using mobile apps to perform a large portion (between 25 and 50 percent) of shopping and product research.

■ By January 2017, following the completion of the 2016 holiday shopping season, more users will be shopping via mobile 50 percent of the time.

■ Mobile-driven “anytime, anywhere” interactions greatly up the ante for capturing the millennial demographic.

■ When an Android mobile app has an average daily crash rate of 0.25 percent crashes per day, Android users are enormously tolerant. As the daily crash rate doubles to 0.5 per day, well over a third of Android users will still not abandon the app.

■ For apps categorized in the Apple App Store as Lifestyle and Shopping Apps, the abandonment rate rises less severely as app crash rate averages go from 0.25 to 0.75.

“Aside from a few pioneers, most retailers, including retail banks with consumer customers, have not yet begun thinking out their mobile strategies, said Dave Robbins, CEO of Crittercism. “Retailers need a thorough understanding of uncontrollable external mobile variables, how they interact, how they behave short term and long term, and how these variables correlate with the retail marketplace.”

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

Hot Topics

The Latest

IT organizations have historically measured success by how quickly they can respond when something goes wrong. The entire discipline of Incident Management has been optimized around mean time to resolution, first-response SLAs and ticket closure rates. But new research suggests that even though this is a well-executed playbook, it's no longer enough to retain customers ...

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...