According to a new study by AppDynamics and the Institute of Management Studies (IMS), the majority of people will delete an application if it operates too slowly.
The study findings are key for understanding just how much speed and efficiency matters when it comes to consumers engaging with apps on a routine basis. The researchers found that 86% respondents had already deleted an app because of slow or inefficient performance, and 33% said that, if their bank’s mobile app performed poorly, they would switch banks rather than deal with an alternate way of doing their banking.
The study was conducted out of both the U.K. and the U.S., and involved about 2,000 participants. The study is large enough that its findings can be extrapolated as representative of typical user interactions with smartphones.
Although these findings might seem worrisome for companies that tend to struggle with app speeds, there were indications that organizations with great mobile apps tended to benefit from it. About 30% of people surveyed said they would spend more money on a company that provided a great app.
This sends a fairly clear message to companies looking to make a profit through mobile conversion: investing in a great app can help ensure the sale. Considering that already, 28% of mobile users access the internet with a mobile device more frequently than they do with a desktop, this factor will only become more important as a shift to increasingly mobile-based internet usage continues. Mary Meeker’s 2014 announcement of annual internet trends echoes this — Meeker and her team have shown that, while the total number of internet users worldwide is growing at a rate of less than 10% annually, the number of smartphone users is still growing by about 20% annually.
“With Forrester analysts projecting U.S. mobile commerce sales alone to top $100 billion in 2014, our study underlines the importance of well performing apps,” said Tom Levey of AppDynamics.