News apps keep user's interest more than others

The chart above shows the typical lifetime cycle of an app. On the x-axis there is the time and on the y-axis the number of Monthly Active Users.

It can be summed up as follows:
- you launch your app and you acquire your first users
- your marketing efforts pay back  and you acquire more users
- you reach your MAU peak
- your MAU decrease over time until the death of the app

Flurry's study focuses on what happens after the peak, in order to answer the following question:
How long does it take for your app to die?

Flurry crunched its data and identified a very interesting pattern. It's during the 3 first months after the MAU peak that your app will loose the biggest amount of users. And after this 3 month virtual gateway, the MAU diminishes less quickly.

In the chart above, you see that during the first month after the MAU peak, 1/4 of apps in the panel have 50% of their max MAU (gray and orange color). In the 3rd month this number grows to 1/2 of apps. After that, the loss occurs at a slower rate.

Another interesting fact is how the results above differ depending on the category of the apps.

In order the measure it, Flurry calculated the "half-life" of apps per category. By "half-life" we mean the number of months, after the peak, in which an app gets 50% MAU.

The result is given in the table above. After 7 months post peak, news apps still have 50% of the max MAU they used to have! That's a huge power of retention, when you see that half life is reached in only 2 months by game apps.

Two additional interesting informations in the table :
- the higher your peak MAU is, the longer it will take for your app to reach its half life;
- iOS apps reach their half life later than Android apps