• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, November 17, 2016

Of course, consumers hate crashing apps.

But how big a problem are crashes, really, and what’s the likelihood that they’ll drive users away?

Well, would you believe that crashes increase churn by as much 534%? That’s six times more than typical churn, and that’s the finding of some new research from Apteligent.

More alarming still, the mobile metrics firm finds that users are up to eight times less likely to return the next day after they experience a crash.

The mobile app metrics firm considers the crash rate for an app to be the number of its crashes divided by the number of its app loads Since the firm is focused on user churn, it distills this metric down into a per-user crash rate.

For example, a single user may have a 100% crash rate (he loaded the app once and it crashed once on a given day). This doesn’t mean that apps themselves are crashing at a 100% rate for all users, but allows Apteligent to consider the segments of the population experiencing the issue.

When most people think of user churn, they think of “hard churn,” which occurs when a user leaves and never returns to a mobile app. Yet churn rate is the percentage of users that do not return over a specified time period. In many cases, this means uninstalling the app completely, but it’s possible for a user to stop using an app for a period of time -- because of a crash, say -- and then return at a later date.

Also of note, Apteligent believes that viewing churn through the lens of Android data represents a more accurate view than using iOS data, since the iOS platform limits the firm from sending a crash until the next app load.

This means that it’s possible for a user to load an app, experience a crash, and never load the app again without ever counting the crash as a cause for churn -- since the crash would be sent on the next app load.