[Editor's Pick] 1 Year Study On Mobile App Usage, 26% of Users Open an App Only Once, In-App Purchase Only 22%

Snapshot
As the number of mobile apps increase in the various app stores, smartphone and tablet users attention spans are shrinking. On average only 26% of users use an app 11+ times, while 55% of users only use an app 1-4 times before losing interest.

Key Points

26% of the time users that have downloaded a mobile app use it only once.
Localytics analyzed the data for all of 2010 and studied app usage from users of Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Windows Phone apps.

In the first quarter they found about 22% of users opened the app only once.
In the second quarter only 26%.
In the third quarter it was 26% again.
In the last quarter of 2010 28% of users only opened the app once.

How often mobile apps are downloaded and used just once

For the entire year approximately 74% of users opened a download mobile app for a second time.
However 26% of the users studied were quite loyal repeat customers and and used the app more than 10 times.
Taking at closer look at users that opened the app more than once:

26% used the app 11+ time.
13% used the app at least 2 times.
9% used the app 3 times.
7% used the app 4 times.
5% used the app 5 times.

Mobile app usage by number of times app is opened

The study also looked at another dynamic of app usage i.e. understanding in-app purchases, specifically how many times a user opened the app until an in-app purchase was made. On average 44% of users made an in-app purchase only after opening and using the app at a minimum of ten times. On average this took 12 days after first running the mobile app.

22% of users made an in-app purchase during their first session of using the app.
33% of users made an in-app purchase only after using the app 2-9 times.