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.
