2015 death of the app store predicted by adjust competition report
- More than 80% of apps are not visible in the stores
- App Store grew by 60% to 1.42 million available apps in 2014
- Emerging user acquisition techniques replace app stores for discovery
BERLIN – January 30, 2015 – Continued crush in the app stores indicates that the store marketplace is an increasingly impenetrable format for the sheer majority of app developers. adjust, a leading app analytics and attribution company, today released a new “App Competition Retrospective Report” showing that competition for visibility in the app stores toughened severely throughout 2014. 82.8% of all apps in the iOS App Store are “Zombie Apps”, meaning they do not rank in the top lists and are effectively invisible in the app stores, up from a breezy 74% at the beginning of the year.
“If this trend continues – and nothing indicates it wouldn’t – we’ll see less than a tenth of apps attracting any kind of organic user attention by the end of the year, and those that do gain attention will be apps that already have significant traction,” says Christian Henschel, CEO and Co-Founder of adjust. “The app store, as a source of organic acquisition, has finite capacity. When that’s reached, the app store will be dead.”
The number of Zombie Apps – those that are not visible in the app store – has almost doubled in 2014 from 657,778 in January to 1,136,501 in December. During this time, the App Store grew by 54.3%, increasing from 889,231 to 1,372,371.
adjust continually monitors and calculates core app market health KPIs, presenting them on apptrace.com. As the new year broke, the team produced a full review of international and regional app markets. That report is available for download as of today for download here: https://www.adjust.com/assets/downloads/the-undead-app-store.pdf
The “Zombie App“ is defined by adjust as an app that does not garner enough downloads to rank in the top lists on more than two thirds of the given time period. Each of the 155 iOS country stores shows up to 300 placements in 23 different genres with 18 additional subgenres under games, with paid and free apps competing in different lists, meaning that there is a large amount of potential placements. An app that is not displayed in the rankings is only available to users searching for it specifically.
”Developers need to look to other ways of promoting their work,“ says Henschel. “In 2015, we’re looking at multiple techniques emerging that allow more ad formats to be less of a nuisance, instead adding value for users. If we can make ad user experience better, we can promote good content in new ways and places. The techniques that we are exploring – such as in-app use of source data – already show great promise to provide really good experiences for users in acquisition.”
The full report, available at adjust.com and through the monthly apptrace newsletter, provides the full scoop on the development and growth of the App Store, the situation in different genres, as well as overviews into regional markets.
###
About adjust (formerly known as adeven)
adjust is a mobile attribution and analytics company that provides app marketers with a comprehensive business intelligence platform. adjust combines attribution for advertising sources with advanced analytics and store statistics such as rankings, ratings and reviews.
Attribution enables mobile app marketers to identify where a user came from and when they installed the app. In the analytics department, adjust offers cohort analysis in addition to deliverable analytics that count sales, events, sessions, installs and clicks. Marketers can group users together by common criteria, such as the install time. KPIs can then be normalized over the lifetime of the user. Additional product features include: app store statistics like global rankings displayed in the dashboard, deep-linking fallback and reattribution for re-engagement campaigns.
adjust is an official Facebook and Twitter mobile measurement partner, and is also integrated with over 200 other major networks worldwide. adjust is ePrivacy certified, uses SSL encryption for data transfer, and is the only mobile analytics company to meet the most stringent privacy compliance standards internationally.
Clients include some of the world’s largest brands in Asia, the EU and the Americas, such as Baidu, Deutsche Telekom, Universal Music and Viacom. adjust delivers app analytics to the world’s largest advertising and media agencies including Vivaki, Publicis and GroupM.
For more information, visit www.adjust.com or contact [email protected].