4 Reasons to Update Your App Every 2 Weeks

April 30, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

2013appstorestats-2 2

When Mike Beltzner, mobile product lead for Pinterest, was asked why the app puts out a new version every three weeks, he had this response:
“Because I got pushback when I tried for two? That’s the honest answer.”
Fantastic answer, isn’t it? Beltzner knows how important it is to keep his app refreshed in today’s environment where a million apps compete for a tiny piece of everyone’s home screen real estate.
How often do you update your app? Once a month? Every other month? If so, your company may be missing out on the benefits of releasing frequent versions. In the mobile industry, two week “sprints” is becoming the standard for development teams. Here are four reasons why you might want to update your app every two weeks.

1. It’s good for the customer.

According to a report by BI Intelligence, across 2013 and 2014, frequently updated apps received generally higher ratings. In fact, “no app earned above-average ratings with less than 9 updates in the year.” Clearly, customers want and appreciate apps that update regularly. Check out this chart mapping ratings to frequency of updates:

2013appstorestats-2
 
As you can see, there is a clear correlation between slow updates and lower ratings, and rapid updates and higher ratings from these big name brands. Your users will vote with their fingers as they rate your app on the Google or Apple app stores, and they aren’t shy about giving one-star ratings if things break or function poorly. Answering user complaints with quick updates is the best form of customer service your app company can provide.

2. It’s good for your company.

Beltzner hits on a great reason why releasing updates quickly benefits your team: a shorter cycle leads to less breakage. At Pinterest, their 3-week cycle means they only change small pieces of code each time. “The risk of any one code change is smaller, so you can innovate faster with less risk.” Longer cycles mean bigger releases, which could lead to much bigger problems if something breaks.

This not only keep your team more agile, but also bakes in another good philosophy for your team to have: fail faster. Smaller mistakes mean it’s not the end of the world, so it’s good to make those mistakes quickly and iterate on them just as quick. Your developers will see what works and what doesn’t faster, especially since 44% of app defects are found by the user. By getting the updates into the hands of your users every two weeks, your team benefits from finding little bugs that don’t destroy user experience.

3. It’s what your competition is doing.

SensorTower found that the average cycle between updates for the top 25 iOS apps is around 30 days. That means half of them have even shorter cycles, closer to 2 and 3 weeks, for companies ranging from Twitter to Candy Crush:
0134-version-update-frequency-chart

We’re not kidding when we say that these development sprints are the norm. To keep up with your peers and competition, your team has to iterate quickly or risk getting left behind.

4. It helps your app stay top-of-mind.

Finally, regular app updates have the added benefit of reminding infrequent users that your app is right there waiting to be opened. Updates can be another way to “push notification” in a gentle, non-intrusive way to your audience. Many brands do this to stay top of mind, especially if users know that an updates comes with a new feature or new content.

Facebook Messenger is a great example of this. Nearly every time Facebook Messenger updates, and it updates frequently, it comes with either a new feature or at least another of its popular sticker packs that users love. For many, an icon indicating an update to Messenger on the corner of their phone means new stickers, which is enough to get them to open the app. A great way to stay top-of-mind.
How often do you update your app? 2 weeks is a great goal, but we’ll let you slide with 3.
For more insights into the mobile app industry, follow our Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn or RSS feeds.

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

The Rise of Apps on Television

April 16, 2015
 
Dan Katcher

It seems to us that there is a seismic shift happening that is changing how TV is delivered. The unbundling of cable and the growing importance of Apple (Apple TV) and Google (Chromecast) in the living room underscores this shift, but it’s still surprising that there are not more apps on your smart TV today.
This article in Wired highlights how Sony is now offering a bundle of programming, including the all-important juggernaut that is sports, that will run right on their Playstations. While that may have been even more relevant years ago when Sony itself was more relevant, the article also reports on Apple’s forthcoming bundled offering as well – 25 Channels for $30 / month. This really is a big announcement – Apple getting into the TV content delivery game. With Apple’s brand, distribution mechanism, and payment infrastructure through iTunes, this could accelerate the shift and remake our living rooms sooner than we think.
The fact is, coming off the recent NCAA thriller, which I watched on my iPad using NCAA’s excellent app, is that this is just another set of trends driving more and more content to the app world directly. ABC delivers great shows via their app. Netflix does the same. The choices of direct content are staggering and increasingly found within an app. Got an Apple TV? Then run Airplay and put your stuff up on it.
NCAA March Madness Live on the App Store on iTunes (1)
Source: iTunes
The ultimate possibility is that content bypasses the cable gatekeepers and just goes straight to apps, and that’s exactly what’s happening.  NCAA’s app was an excellent example and it highlighted how other interactive programming can be beautifully wrapped around the core live programming. There’s no question that app makers will have orders of magnitude greater success adding to programming than software makers for cable set top boxes. There’s really no contest.
It was also fascinating to note how the advertising stream was wrapped right into the app cast – no concern about revenue models there – which brings us to Google’s effort to get local ads to match local programming. This article highlights their efforts and really brings to mind just how transformative the trend is: ads delivered in real time, based on geography, dependent on programming or viewing history, you name it. The long standing television ad model is about to be remade with ads that are potentially more relevant, trackable, and ultimately more valuable.
I think what’s most interesting is the pace of how it’s all happening – not as dramatic and instant as what the iPhone did to our world, but steady nonetheless.  And when Apple does roll out bundled content, things are bound to accelerate.  Maybe I said that already? But it bears repeating! And consider this: Apple has still yet to open Apple TV to third party developers. Once it does, what a great gaming platform for the living room that could be. Talk about another seismic shift in the multi-billion dollar gaming industry.
So we’ll join in the chorus: TV is dead. Long live TV.
For more insights into the mobile app industry, follow our Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn or RSS feeds.

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

Mobile App Metrics, Part 3: 2 Revenue Metrics

April 14, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

This is part 3 of a 3-part series on mobile app metric best practices. Check out Part 1, Usage Metrics and Part 2, Acquisition Metrics.

>Here comes the money shot of our app metrics series. Literally. We’ll be diving into Revenue Metrics; the metric your CFO is most eager to track. Now that you know the usage patterns of your customer base, and how much it costs to acquire your customers, here are two key metrics to track to see just how much revenue you’re bringing in.>

1. Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

This metric is simply the total revenue from your users divided by total users, in a given period of time. Depending on your business, it might make sense to calculate this using monthly numbers (good for subscription models) or all-time numbers (good for one-time purchase models).
Trending your ARPU is a quick and easy way for your company to see if there needs to be some course-correction. A dip in this metric means you need to quickly assess whether the amount of revenue coming in has decreased, or whether your user base has expanded without a corresponding increase in revenue. In general, if your ARPU is higher than your CAC (or CPI), you’re in good shape: you are making positive margin on each user.
So what is a good ARPU number? It varies by industry. Gaming seems to average about $1.96 and you can see that the top 1% games mop up the competition in this statistic. Meanwhile, a popular social app like WhatsApp has an ARPU of $7.00, which values it at astronomical levels. To get some comparison, here’s a chart with the ARPU of some big name companies in general:
2013-08-31-1
Source: Forbes.com
So if your app is making about a buck fifty from each user, congratulations! You’re the next LinkedIn…as long as you have the millions upon millions of users that LinkedIn also has.

2. Lifetime Value (LTV)

The other key revenue metric to track is the Lifetime Value of each user: how much revenue you expect to make from a customer as long as they remain a customer. The quick way to calculate this is ARPU divided by your churn rate, but LTV is a statistic that can get complicated very quickly. While you are sure to refine how you calculate LTV as you go, even a simple calculate of this metric will be incredibly helpful to trend.
In mobile, the “lifetime” of a user can usually be generalized to 1 year, though it varies widely as you can see in this chart from Flurry Analytics of the half-life (how long it takes to lose half their users) of apps in various categories:
Median-App-Half-Life-table-resized-600_0
Thus, a year is a pretty generous time frame, but it generally ensures you’ll see all the revenue you will out of each user.
LTV is a metric you must always think about growing. How can you keep paying users longer? How can you get users to keep paying for your app or in your ecosystem? The top 1% grossing apps have an LTV 20 times bigger than the next top 5% grossing apps. This means that for your app to really win big, you need to keep thinking of ways to get more revenue from each user.
With ARPU and LTV, and all the previous metrics in our series, your burgeoning app company should be poised to use metrics to improve your business. Keep these metrics in plain view as you grow and stay on top of your numbers!
For more insights into the mobile app industry, follow our Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn or RSS feeds.
Listview Photo Credit

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.