Ever wonder how the top Android apps manage to gain and retain superiority? Of course, there is no simple answer and the recipe for success is often extensive and convoluted. We won’t argue that brand awareness plays a major role, or that a nice feature set can give you an edge over the competition, but a new analysis on data collected from 125 million Android phones and Google Play reveals a rather interesting pattern and hints that the first few days in an app’s life cycle are far more important than a lot of you may think.

Andrew Chen, along with Ankit Jain – CEO of a mobile intelligence startup called “Quettra” are responsible for the analysis and their findings seem to show that it’s quite likely for an Android app to lose about as much as 80% of all its users within a month of the initial app install. The fact is that most Android users tend to shop around quite a bit for their apps, which usually means installing a bunch of alternatives, giving them a quick try and then possibly moving on to the next. This is why, as evident by the graph, as much as 75% of users typically leave the app on the same day they install it and at the end of the first week, that number is usually over 80%.

Now, one could argue that this is just because the average metric is distorted by the sea of objectively bad apps out there in the Android realm, but, interestingly enough, when they moved on to analize just the very top performing applications, Andrew Chen, and Ankit Jain stumbled upon a quite similar user retention pattern. The general timing seems to be the same and large drops tend to coincide, the only real difference being that the most popular apps have managed to lower the percent of losses significantly.

This all leads to one logical conclusion – apps need to capture users as quick as possible and impress them at first sight, or else the typical usage patterns are simply working against them and active user counts will plummet. As Ankit Jain puts it:

Users try out a lot of apps but decide which ones they want to ‘stop using’ within the first 3-7 days. For ‘decent’ apps, the majority of users retained for 7 days stick around much longer. The key to success is to get the users hooked during that critical first 3-7 day period.

What this translates to is developing experiences that are engaging at first sight. Some examples might include, giving the user a big bonus at the beginning of a game and a daily incentive to come back for more rewards, or perhaps in a more social or communications app – get them invested in the platform straight away, by guiding them through a profile creation wizard and linking them with current users and friends. These tactics may vary, but if you were wondering why your mobile app isn’t doing all that well, despite your endless efforts to add in new features, it might be time to invest more in a catchy description, some Google play multimedia content and a good retention scheme for first time…

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You may have heard of LeEco (formerly LeTV) when it became the first company to sell a smartphone powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chipset. In the meantime, many more handsets have chosen to employ that particular chip, but LeEco is apparently hard at work on its next device.

This is allegedly going to be called Le 2, which might mean it’s been created as the successor to the Le 1s. The pictures you can see below (click the thumbnails to look at the full-size versions) are said to be of the Le 2, covering a decent amount of angles.

LeEco Le 2

The LeEco Le 2 will reportedly sport either the Snapdragon 820 or the MediaTek Helio X20 chipset (there will be two variants), along with 4GB of RAM and a 21 MP main camera. The fingerprint sensor on the back is of the ultrasonic variety, and a USB Type-C port is on board for connectivity purposes and charging. Those are unfortunately all the spec details we have for now.

Speaker grill holes can be seen on both sides of that port, which may mean the phone will have two speakers. Then again, many smartphones use similar designs but only actually ship with one speaker, with the holes on the other side being purely cosmetic. Anyway, the frame of the handset seems to be metal. Its back cover could be metal too, or maybe not – it’s not easy to tell just from these shots.

If this is the real deal and it’s being worked on by the Chinese smartphone maker, we expect to hear much more about the Le 2 in the coming weeks.

Source (in Chinese) |…

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