Short and Long Term Retention Benchmarks

I’m launching a consumer mobile app in a non-traditional category, it lies somewhere between design, mindfulness and games. I wanted to build a set of short and long term retention benchmarks for the product which sent me on a long hunt for retention numbers for mobile apps. I’m coalescing them in this post for anyone to use [with sources included].

Short Term (D1, D7, D30) Retention

Average across several mobile app categories: Adjust has published their 2020 report with retention curves averaged across categories.

Interact with the numbers in the original source: https://www.adjust.com/resources/downloads/app-trends-2020/?download=%2Fresources%2Fdownloads%2Fapp-trends-2020

Top 1000 Apps: Averages miss the distribution of retention numbers, so below is the TOP 1000 apps and their benchmarks, however this data is from 2018 but a good enough proxy:

Source: https://www.emarketer.com/chart/228505/mobile-app-performance-metrics-worldwide-average-30-day-retention-rates-by-category-2018

It’s interesting to note the difference between averages and the top 1000 apps. Ex. Casual Games D30 across all apps is 6%, however the top apps are around 12%

Specific Apps: I found a source with some specific apps skewed towards games:

Source:https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/retention

Hearsay: Retention numbers I’ve heard around the industry/seen on social media.

For Games: D1 retention 25% (top15% >35%), D7 retention 5% (top15% > 14%), D30 retention 1.5% (top15% > 6%)

Top social media app retention > Top Dating apps retention > Top Games retention > Top mindfulness/health apps

Long Term Retention (6 month, 12 month)

There is a great post that talks about these benchmarks (https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/what-is-good-retention-issue-29). I won’t repost them here.

Other types of Retention

There’s other retention metrics like (Week 1, Week 4, Month 1 etc) that are also helpful for benchmarking but I haven’t found too many good benchmarks around here. However, some back of the napkin math from D1,7,30 and combination with DAU/WAU can help get close to the numbers. Here is a helpful chart (from 2016 data):