Guest Post: There are hundreds of thousands of mobile apps out there. At AppStoreHQ, we’re currently tracking nearly 700,000 apps across the Android and iOS platforms. Some of these apps are very popular; there are plenty of stories about apps with millions — or even tens of millions — of downloads, such as Angry Birds, Facebook, Fruit Ninja, Pandora, Twitter, and Google Maps.
What about the other side of the coin? I’m sure you’ve had the experience of downloading an app, then uninstalling it, for whatever reason. Perhaps you didn’t use it very frequently, or you found another app that did the same thing, but better. Maybe it was buggy, or drained your battery. Maybe you just thought its icon didn’t look good on your home screen. Whatever the reason, you ditched it.
We decided to take a look at the data we have gathered on the Android platform via our AppESP technology to find out which apps are uninstalled most frequently. (AppESP uses the apps that a user has installed to personalize the experience and provide targeted mobile apps recommendations. In doing so, it also provides an aggregated view of mobile app trends.)
To be fair, we looked at uninstall rates — how many times an app was uninstalled compared to how many times it was installed. For example, Pandora, Skype, and Angry Birds all have a large volume of uninstalls, but very low uninstall rates. We looked at apps installed over the past 10 weeks, and then looked at the past week’s worth of uninstalls to calculate the rate.
Below are the ten Android apps with the highest uninstall rates based on those parameters.
#10) Hangman Free (12.5% uninstall rate) – Think you have a good vocabulary? Find out with this chalkboard classic.
#9) Texas Poker (12.5%) – Why wait for this rare opportunity when you can just download the app and play with millions of poker players from all over the world.
#8) Find Differences (12.9%) – Compare two images and spot five differences between them.
#7) Jamie’s 20 Minute Meals (13.0%) – There’s 60 recipes in total, each one presented one step at a time, with photos along the way, so you really can’t go wrong.
#6) Pinball Classic (13.2%) – If you love Pinball on Windows then this is the most classic Pinball game for you.
#5) News360 for Phones (13.6%) – A next-generation news aggregator that gives you all sides of every story.
#4) Baseball Superstars II (14.6%) – Baseball Superstars II is a full featured baseball game with 7 different modes to satisfy everyone’s needs.
#3) Reverse Lookup (16.0%) – Find out who’s on the other end of unknown calls.
#2) PicsIn Magic Effects (17.4%) – Many photo effects such as Stenciler, Cartoonizer, Sketcher, Orton, Lomo, Vintage, Cross Process, HDR, Fattal, Pencil, Holgaart and more.
#1) Dolphin Text Sizer (18.2%) – Quickly adjust font size to help you browse small text with ease.
Interestingly enough, most of these are actually pretty decent apps, so it may be that they are uninstalled because users just didn’t use them very often, rather than because of bugs. If you’ve tried any of them and uninstalled them, let us know why in the comments. And if you’re the developer of one of these apps, let us know if you have any theories on why your app has been uninstalled.
Scott Blanksteen is the CEO of AppStoreHQ, a Seattle-based startup that operates a mobile app directory and recommendation engine. Follow Scott on Twitter @sib1013
