Besides exploring their creativity and channeling it into an app that people can enjoy either from an entertainment or business perspective, it is every developer’s dream to have more than a significant number of users – App UserBase. The big question then is; how many users is a realistic figure for a developer to be content with?
When developing Apps, developers tend to estimate the market share they would like to acquire as a percentage of the amount of devices on the market their app would be able to sit on. A good example would be, say an app can sit on half a billion devices and estimating that one would like to acquire 0.5% of that user base. This comes to a total of 2.5 million users, which is nowhere close to being realistic because of all the different variants, that affect the rate of App downloads on apps markets.
Downloads on App Stores
The reality on the app stores is that more than 40 million apps are downloaded every day. The split indicates clearly that it’s the gaming, communications and social media apps that lead the charts. Following slightly behind are educational apps. The educational apps downloads are most likely to increase in growth significantly as a lot of people are taking to learning more about the industries they work in instead of formally educating themselves due to the increased costs of a formal education globally. The absence of high quality education in most countries is also pushing people to learn through educational apps. Health ones are growing fast as well.
User Base Behavior
Stats also show that the users that every developer wants to have on their platforms – the wealthy people, who won’t hesitate to pay for an app upfront, rarely buy apps. The rest of the other users like free apps – developers should therefore focus more on these facts to get a realistic user base and then adjust their revenue models according to that.
But users are also known to be very fickle – they take up an app today and in a week or two’s time, they drop that app and move on to the next best one. There’s also loyalty based on what the app can do for the user which is why social media and communications apps that one can make use of on a daily basis seem to maintain their users.
Based on the number of downloads on both the iOS and Android stores – it is a reality that apps sink before they are even known of. The ones that manage to stay usually have to hit the 2,00,000 user base level to get noticed. It’s at this level that the app visibility will help in raking in more users and growing significantly. The realistic figure would then be around 2,00,000 still considering whether the app will be fore free or payment upfront and the category that it falls under.