Uninstall Rate

The uninstall rate is the share of people who install your app and then delete it. If a hundred people install it in a week and twelve delete it, the uninstall rate for that week is twelve percent. Both stores show the number. Very few owners look at it, which is a pity, because it is the most honest thing the store will ever tell you.

Most deletions happen in the first seven days, and a large part on the first day. That timing matters. It means the app was not rejected after a fair trial. It was rejected on the first screen, before it had a chance to be useful. Anything you fix on that screen is worth ten times more than anything you fix deeper in.

Four reasons cover most of it. The first is that there is no reason to come back, because the person did the one thing they needed and the app offers them nothing else. The second is notification noise, three messages a day about nothing at all, and the app is gone by Friday. The third is size, because a large app is the first thing deleted when a cheap phone runs out of room. The fourth is a sign-in the person cannot get through, the quietest killer of them all, since nobody writes a review about it.

Read the number against your own history, not against a table you found on the internet. Watch what it does after a release, and split it by where the person came from. An advertising campaign that brings the wrong crowd shows up here first. Installs rise, deletions rise faster, and the money is gone. That is why Linkysoft looks at this number together with the digital marketing work rather than treating it as a technical detail.

One test costs nothing. Install your own app on a cheap phone, with a slow connection and no account. Try to reach the first useful moment. If it takes more than a minute, or asks for a password before it shows you anything, you have found the reason for your uninstall rate. Linkysoft measures that first minute on every mobile app project, because it decides how many of the people you paid to attract are still there next week.