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Giacomo Balli
The Mobile Guy

Over a decade of mobile experience at your service.
I help business owners leverage mobile technology.

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How fast do users update iOS apps? Some numbers shared.

appannieToday I was browsing Quora for interesting questions and came across this one.
I had a vague idea in mind but figured I'd do something "nice" and get real numbers to provide an answer to a question which I'm sure many people have: What percentage of app users upgrade to a new version?
I figured MyLyrics (read more about the app here) would be the best app to give a relatively objective insight of what is going on. It is a free app, which averages 500 downloads per day and has been steady for the past 2+ years.
I headed over to my favorite app analytics website, AppAnnie, and pulled up stats since the app was first launched.I love looking at graphs of apps that have been available for a long period of time because it makes it very easy to see trends (awesome when they're positive trends :) ).
I picked one of the latest updates, noted down the total number of updates during the 8 days after the update release and then the individual updates for each day.
[caption id="attachment_622" align="aligncenter" width="595"]mylyrics stats All-time MyLyrics app stats from AppAnnie[/caption]
The following is the update rate for MyLyrics:
Day 1: 35% Day 2: 51% Day 3: 61% Day 4: 69% Day 5: 76% Day 6: 81% Day 7: 85% Day 8: 88.5%
Conclusion: after 10 days you can expect pretty much every user to have downloaded the latest version of your app. Unfortunately this only describes at which rate updates were executed. There is no way of knowing precisely how many users skip updates (only guesstimate).

#appannie, #mylyrics, #stats
Published: Sun, Nov 18 2012 @ 13:37:47
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