tvOS devs may be driven away from developing for Apple TV, claims a new report citing poor audience retention rates.
Suggesting that users are “generally disinterested” in Apple TV, the report from mobile app analytics company adjust says they found that just 8.9 percent of users return to a tvOS app seven days after installing it. That’s roughly half the number seen on mobile devices, where the comparable numbers stand at nearly 20 percent on tablets and 18.5 percent on smartphones.
Things get even worse over time, too. As per adjust, after 30 days app developers on tvOS are only likely to retain 4.1 percent of acquired users, which has big implications for developers’ chances of earning profits from in-app purchases or advertising.
adjust’s study isn’t perfect, of course. It’s based on a small sample of users (apparently “299,925 users, of which around two percent had been active on an Apple TV device”) for one thing. However, the company did sample apps which had been ported from iOS to the Apple TV, so that the comparison was made on the same apps’ performance on tvOS versus iPhone and iPad. The apps sampled were ones which typically fall in the top third of apps based on retention performance.
“These are apps that are some of the best performers on phones and tablets, yet when the apps are brought to Apple TV — just like tvOS was meant to — they fall flat,” said Christian Henschel, CEO and Co-Founder of adjust, “Compared to the benchmarks, the tvOS apps are the lowest quartile performers overall.”
Compared to the more established iOS ecosystem, the tvOS App Store is still in its relative infancy for Apple. However, this is hardly good news — and something that is particularly timely given that this week marks the start of Apple’s developer-focused WWDC.
