--- title: What Are the Main Reasons Mobile Apps Fail? description: Most mobile apps fail before launch or shortly after. Learn the main reasons apps fail, from feature bloat and weak onboarding to no marketing plan. image: https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/what-are-the-main-reasons-mobile-apps-fail.webp --- [Skip to content](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-are-the-main-reasons-mobile-apps-fail#main-content) [![we\_are\_affective\_logo\_200](https://weareaffective.com/hs-fs/hubfs/we_are_affective_logo_200.png?width=175&height=48&name=we_are_affective_logo_200.png "we_are_affective_logo_200")](https://weareaffective.com) - [Home](https://weareaffective.com) - About Us - [Our Story](https://weareaffective.com/about) - [How We Work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) - Our Services - [App Planning & Strategy](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) - [App Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-design-agency) - [App UX Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ux-design) - [App UI Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ui-design) - [App Technical Architecture](https://weareaffective.com/app-architecture) - [Existing App Audits](https://weareaffective.com/app-audit) - [Case Studies](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies) - [Pricing](https://weareaffective.com/pricing) - [Learning Centre](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre) - [Get Started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started) Expert Guide Series # What Are the Main Reasons Mobile Apps Fail? Table of Contents On a sports club app project we [worked on, the client reached the end of the budget](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-scope-creep-actually-costs-a-sports-club-app-that-spent-twelve-months-growi) with nothing on the app store. Not a thin first version. Nothing at all. Feature after feature went in, the money ran out, and the two of us parted ways. That project didn't come apart because of the code or the framework or the build team. It came apart in meetings, months before launch was even a date in anyone's diary. > The decisions that sink an app are usually made months before launch. That's the shape of most of the work we're asked to look at. Why mobile apps fail usually has very little to do with technology and a great deal to do with whether anybody needed the thing, whether the first thirty seconds make any sense, and whether the team kept working after release day. What follows is drawn from projects we've run, including ones that went wrong and ones where we were overruled and watched the cost of it. Some of these failures are loud and obvious. Most are quiet. An app sits on the store, gets a trickle of installs, loses nearly everyone by day three, and nobody writes in to say why. We'll go through the main reasons apps fail, in roughly the order they tend to happen. ## Building for a Need Nobody Actually Has Before we look at any brief in detail, we ask three plain questions. What need is this product going to fill? How are people meeting that need right now, without it? And how do they feel about meeting it that way? The third question settles most arguments. If people are reasonably content with a notebook, a group chat or a shared spreadsheet, there's no gap for an app to live in. As Simon puts it, "there's no point building a technical solution for something that people are quite happy doing in a more manual process". The useful territory is where the current process is letting people down, and letting them down emotionally as well as practically. Annoyance, worry and embarrassment are better starting points than inefficiency. On a music app project, the client came to us from the music world and knew precisely what their recordings had cost to produce. They wanted that money back within weeks of launch. The price was set by what the content had cost them rather than by what a listener was willing to pay, and that anchor stopped them considering a lower price point or a longer game built on volume. #### Where the idea usually comes from Most failed apps start with something the founder already owns, whether that's content, a licence, a contact list or a strong opinion. CB Insights puts no market need near the top of its list of why startups fail, with [CB Insights](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/startup-failure-reasons-top/) reporting 42 per cent of failures down to exactly that. ## When Research Becomes a Box-Ticking Exercise Research only helps if you're willing to be wrong. We worked with a founder who had deep experience in their industry and very firm views about how the product should work. The research got commissioned, the sessions ran, the findings were written up, and none of it was ever going to change anything. It was a box to tick on the way to the thing they'd already decided to build. We showed them strong evidence that a large part of their intended user base didn't want particular features and preferred a different way of doing the same job. They didn't move an inch. We ended the engagement. About a year later they launched the product more or less as originally drawn, and as far as we can tell it went nowhere. The painful part is that the research had already named the reasons. Discovery that gets ignored costs you twice, once for the work and once for the launch that it tried to prevent. #### What honest research looks like Honest research starts with a question the team can't already answer, and it includes at least one finding the founder dislikes. If every session confirms the plan, the questions were leading. Good discovery should make you cancel something, shrink something, or change the order you build in. ## UX/UI design built around *real* psychology We design app interfaces around how people actually think and behave. User research, psychology-driven UX/UI design and technical specs delivered as one complete package. [See how we work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) [Get started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started) No commitment ## Trying to Do Too Many Things at Once On a grassroots football app we worked on, the client judged each feature against the best single-purpose app in that category. The booking section got compared to a dedicated booking app, the payments section to a dedicated payments app, the team chat to a chat app. Each comparison produced the same request, which was that the booking process needed to be "more intuitive". We pushed back, explained what we thought the real problem was, and then did what was asked. The interaction changes made almost no difference, because the friction wasn't in the taps. > Those features lived in separate apps for a reason, and one product couldn't hold them all. The client was trying to do too much in one place. Despite a lot of effort to make something cohesive and emotionally grounded, we ended up with a product that was overly complex and far too verbose for a parent standing on a touchline on a wet Sunday morning. It didn't work for the audience and it didn't work for the core purpose. Breadth feels like value during the [app planning stage](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) and reads as confusion once it's on a phone. Every extra thing an app does adds a decision for the user on first open, and first open is where you have the least patience to spend. ## The First Three Seconds: Performance and Technical Failure We think about abandonment in three windows, because the causes in each one are completely different and so are the fixes. Simon describes the first as immediate abandonment, roughly the first three to four seconds, where the app is slow to load, sluggish to respond, crashing, freezing or eating memory. Nothing you designed gets a chance to work. | Window | Usual cause | What helps | | --- | --- | --- | | 3 to 4 seconds | Slow load, sluggish taps, crashes, storage use | Performance budget, real-device testing | | 60 to 120 seconds | Forced sign-up, tutorial screens, cold permission requests | Value before registration | | First 3 days | No reason to return, surprise costs, battery drain | A clear reason to open it again | Performance is the cheapest of the three to fix and the most commonly left until last. According to [PCloudy](https://www.pcloudy.com/blogs/app-performance-and-observability-key-to-retaining-users/), 53 per cent of users abandon an app that takes longer than three seconds to load. Mobile app failure at this stage never shows up as feedback, because the person never got far enough in to have an opinion worth sending you. Test on the oldest phone and the worst connection in your target market, not on the newest handset in the studio. That's where your three seconds are decided. ## Onboarding That Loses People in Two Minutes The second window runs from about sixty to a hundred and twenty seconds, and it's where onboarding does its damage. Registration demanded before anything useful has happened. Five tutorial screens explaining a product nobody has used yet. A location or notifications prompt fired with no reason attached. Each one asks for something before the app has given anything. In a meditation app teardown we did, the app promised calm in under a minute and then asked the user to define their goals. That assumes somebody arriving in a rational, curious frame of mind. As Simon says, "nobody really opens a meditation app the first time because they're already calm and curious. They open it because they really need to destress and they need some help with that." The screen was built for a state the user wasn't in. A client of ours added a rating prompt that fired the moment someone opened the app. People hadn't had a chance to experience the value of the product, so the score meant nothing and the interruption cost them a first impression. Prompts like that belong after a positive moment, once somebody has finished something or got a result. Count the taps between opening the app for the first time and getting one genuinely useful thing out of it. If that number is above three, you've got an onboarding problem. ## The 77 Per Cent Problem: Why Day Three Decides Everything The third window is the first three days, and it's brutal. [Business of Apps](https://www.businessofapps.com/guide/mobile-app-retention/) reports that on average [apps lose 77 per cent of their daily active users](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-causes-retention-to-collapse-between-day-one-and-day-thirty-on-lifestyle-ap) within three days of installation. That number gets quoted a lot as if it were weather, something that happens to everybody equally and can't be argued with. It can be argued with. Even very good products shed a large slice of their daily users over the same three days, because some churn is just people trying things. The distance between that figure and the 77 per cent average is the part you own, and it's made up of onboarding, early value and giving people a reason to open the thing again on Tuesday. Day three failure has three usual causes in the work we've looked at. There's no retention mechanism, so nothing brings the user back. There's a cost that appears after download, which reads as a bait and switch. Or the need was real but occasional, and the app has quietly stopped being relevant. Day three is also the cheapest moment to intervene. You still have the user's attention and their install. A week later you're doing re-engagement, which costs money and works less often. ## A Brand Promise the Product Doesn't Keep We worked on a mobile app in the health and wellness genetics sector where the brand and the product were pulling in opposite directions. The packaging and the website were luxurious and aspirational, all about becoming a better version of yourself and reaching your full potential. The app, which had already been built, was cold and clinical, functional in both its copy and its design. Think about that journey from the user's side. You buy into something aspirational, you order a kit, you spit in a tube, you post it, you wait, and then you open the app to find out something quite personal about yourself. > The packaging promised a better version of you and the app delivered a lab report. The experience was jarring at exactly the moment it mattered most. Everything the marketing had built up got spent in the few seconds it took to load a results screen that read like a printout. The product touchpoint is where the promise gets tested, and it's usually the touchpoint with the least brand thinking in it, because it was handed to a development team as a set of features. Emotional consistency is a design requirement, the same as load time. Tone, pace, colour and the words on a results screen all carry the promise or break it. ## Skipping Discovery on the Parts That Seem Simple On a dating app project built around verified profiles and keeping bots out, the client wanted to skip discovery for messaging and put everything into the onboarding process. Messaging felt like a solved problem. Everybody knows what a chat screen looks like. So we built a generic messaging feature, and it allowed automated messages and fake messages, which is precisely what the whole verification system existed to stop. The rigorous front door opened onto a room anyone could walk into. As Simon put it, all that emphasis on onboarding and verification "didn't then stack up with the other parts of the product". Rewriting that section cost around fifteen thousand pounds of extra budget and about two months of extra work. The saving on discovery was a fraction of that. #### Why mobile apps fail from the inside Products contradict themselves when discovery is done feature by feature rather than across the whole thing. The parts that look generic are the ones carrying your promise quietly, which is why they need checking against the premise of the product. Messaging in a verified dating app is a trust feature wearing a chat feature's clothing. For every feature you're tempted to call standard, write one sentence on how it has to behave differently because of what your product claims to be. If you can't write it, discovery hasn't happened. ## Scope Creep and the Budget That Runs Out Before Launch Back to the sports club app. We told the client early and clearly that the budget was heading out of control and that they risked ending up with a product that wasn't ready and no money left to finish it. The warning was noted. Features kept being added anyway, one after another, each one perfectly reasonable on its own. They burned through the entire budget and never got anything onto the store. Not a beta, not a soft launch, nothing. Simon's reading of it is simple, which is that working with the process and listening to professional advice is what decides whether a project ships. Budgets today go further on a narrow first release than they ever have, and nowhere near as far on a broad one. Build and design costs have held up while expectations of polish have risen, so a release carrying eight features is usually eight half-finished things. A release carrying two is two finished ones, and finished is what gets used. Resisting an iterative process is the most expensive preference a client can hold. Everything-at-once sounds ambitious in a kick-off meeting and reads as a deleted project folder eighteen months later. ## Launching Into Silence: No Marketing, No Discovery An app store listing is a shelf in a very large shop with no signage. Products get built on the quiet assumption that the store itself does the distribution, and then launch week arrives with no audience, no press, no community and no plan beyond telling friends and family. CB Insights found that 29 per cent of failures trace back to an inadequate marketing plan, which matches what we've watched happen on projects where marketing was treated as a phase that starts after development finishes. That reading is covered in the [CB Insights](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/startup-failure-reasons-top/) work on startup failure. Launch marketing wants to begin while the product is still being designed, because the two jobs feed each other. The language people use when they describe their current workaround is the language that belongs in your store listing. The thing testers get excited about is the thing your first screenshot should show. There's a second cost to launching into silence. With no traffic, you learn nothing. Analytics on fifty installs tells you very little, so the team ends up guessing for another three months about what to build next. Marketing buys you data as much as it buys you users. ## Treating Launch as the Finish Line Launch is the point at which you finally start learning something real, and plenty of teams treat it as the day the work stops. The budget gets spent, the squad disperses, and the app sits there collecting a slow drip of installs while nobody watches what happens inside it. #### Why mobile apps fail quietly Mobile apps rarely tell you they're dying. People don't file complaints, raise support tickets or explain why they deleted something. As Simon says, "it's very easy to assume, you know, no news is good news, but actually it's quite the opposite with mobile apps." > Silence from users reads like approval, and it's usually people leaving quietly without telling you why. So you have to go looking. Retention by cohort, drop-off points in onboarding, dwell time on the screens that carry your value, sentiment tracking where you can get it. The questions worth asking monthly are which screen loses the most people, what the last thing someone did before they stopped opening the app was, and which users came back on day seven. A plan for the twelve weeks after launch, with budget attached, changes the odds more than almost anything you do in the twelve weeks before it. ## Questions to Ask Before You Build Anything These are the questions we work through with a client at the start, roughly in this order. They're plain on purpose, because the hard part is answering them honestly rather than understanding them. 1. What need does this fill, and who exactly has it? 2. How are those people meeting that need today, without an app? 3. How do they feel about doing it that way, and where does it let them down? 4. What's the one thing a new user has to get in their first minute? 5. What brings them back on day three, specifically? 6. Which features can be cut from version one and still leave something worth downloading? Question six is the one that causes arguments, and it's the one that protects the budget. Every feature you defend on day one is a feature you'll be debugging, designing, writing copy for and supporting for years. Worth asking too whether anyone on the team is prepared to be wrong. Discovery that can't change the plan is a receipt rather than research, and we've walked away from a project where that was the case. The main reasons apps fail tend to be visible in these answers long before a build starts, which is the only good news in any of this. ## Conclusion Pull the stories together and a pattern shows up. The sports club app died of feature after feature and no release. The grassroots football app died of trying to be five apps. The dating app cost fifteen thousand pounds extra because messaging looked generic. The genetics app had a brand saying one thing and a product saying another. The founder who treated research as a box to tick launched a year later and went nowhere. None of those are technical failures. They're decisions about scope, need, honesty and sequence, made by people who were doing their best with incomplete information and, in a few cases, with advice they chose not to take. The good news is that these are all cheap to fix early. Asking how people feel about their current workaround costs a few conversations. Cutting version one in half costs nothing at all. Testing your first sixty seconds on somebody who has never seen the product takes an afternoon. If you're planning an app, or sitting with one that isn't holding onto people past day three, we're happy to talk it through and tell you what we'd want to check first. [Let's talk about your app](https://weareaffective.com/get-started). ## Frequently Asked Questions What is the single biggest reason mobile apps fail? In most cases it is that nobody actually needed the app in the first place. If people are reasonably content solving the problem with a notebook, a group chat or a spreadsheet, there is no gap for an app to fill, and CB Insights puts no market need at the top of its list of startup failures at 42 per cent. How can I tell whether there is a genuine need for my app idea? Ask three plain questions before you write a brief. What need will this product fill, how are people meeting that need right now without it, and how do they feel about meeting it that way. The third question settles most arguments, because annoyance, worry and embarrassment signal a real gap in a way that mere inefficiency does not. Is it true that most apps fail for technical reasons? No. The decisions that sink an app are usually made in meetings months before launch, long before the code or the framework matters. Projects more often come apart over whether anyone needed the product, whether the first thirty seconds make sense, and whether the team kept working after release day. What is the point of user research if I already know my industry? Research only helps if you are genuinely willing to be proved wrong. Deep industry experience can harden into firm views that no amount of evidence will shift, and discovery that gets ignored costs you twice, once for the work itself and once for the lesson you refused to learn. How do I avoid turning research into a box-ticking exercise? Agree in advance what findings would change your plan and who has the authority to act on them. If the answer is that nothing in the research could alter the product you have already drawn in your head, you are better off saving the money and accepting the risk openly. How should I price my app? Price according to what a user is willing to pay, not what your content or development cost you to produce. Anchoring to your own costs, as one music client did, blocks you from considering a lower price point or a longer game built on volume. What is scope creep and how does it kill a project? Scope creep is the steady addition of features during a build, each one reasonable on its own. On one sports club app, feature after feature went in until the budget ran out with nothing on the app store at all, not even a thin first version. Why do apps lose most of their users in the first few days? Usually because the first thirty seconds do not make sense to a new user, and nobody writes in to explain why they left. These failures are quiet rather than dramatic, so you need analytics and direct user contact to spot them, plus a team still working on the product after release day. ## Related Articles [![Why Do Most Social Media Apps Fail?](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/why-do-most-social-media-apps-fail.webp)](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-do-most-social-media-apps-fail) ### [Why Do Most Social Media Apps Fail?](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-do-most-social-media-apps-fail) A pre-launch founder in the football space came to us with a colour-coded spreadsheet mapping every... by [Simon Lee](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/author/simon-lee) [![Whats the break even point for most business apps](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/whats-the-break-even-point-for-most-business-apps.webp)](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/whats-the-break-even-point-for-most-business-apps) ### [Whats the break even point for most business apps](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/whats-the-break-even-point-for-most-business-apps) A founder building a consumer app in the wellness space once came to us with a detailed financial... by [Simon Lee](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/author/simon-lee) [![Why 80% of Business Apps Fail and How to Be in the 20%?](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/why-80-of-business-apps-fail-and-how-to-be-in-the-20.webp)](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-80-percent-of-business-apps-fail-and-how-to-be-in-the-20-percent) ### [Why 80% of Business Apps Fail and How to Be in the 20%](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-80-percent-of-business-apps-fail-and-how-to-be-in-the-20-percent) Around 80% of business apps fail. 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