The 3-second rule you need to know, to engage customers with your mobile app

~ Written By Lara Irwin

Your organisation’s app gets just 3 seconds of screen time to engage 60% of customers before they give up on it - maybe forever*.

Are you confident that your app delivers an experience that can keep your audience hanging around for longer than that? Feel free to open it up and experience it for yourself.

How did it do, and what did you think? Just as importantly, did you check how it performed on other mobile operating systems?

Native mobile apps are the answer to great engagement

With a huge choice of smartphones to decide between, it’s harder than ever to reach your audience on a single platform. At the beginning of 2017, over 60% of smartphones ran on Android OS, around 30% run on Apple’s iOS and the last 10% were spread across a variety of other operating systems².

The problem is that what works well on Android might deliver a dreadful experience on Windows Mobile, and might slow your app to a crawl on iOS. So, even if your audience does stay for more than three seconds, they probably won’t be sticking around for much longer.

Hybrid applications developed for one OS and stretched to fit across others is merely a round-peg-in-a-square-hole solution. Only apps designed specifically for a certain mobile operating system can deliver the speed and performance necessary to engage and delight your audience.

Research into these native apps shows they can double an application’s engagement rates, so it’s no surprise that the use of native apps has risen by almost 20% since 2014.

Native doesn’t have to mean uneconomic

Each operating system requires a particular skill-set to code in and develop on, for example, iOS uses Objective-C and Swift, but Android uses Java. Not all developers are proficient in both, so to develop a native app for more than one platform will mean adopting a siloed (and expensive) development route.

Needing one team dedicated to iOS development and another dedicated to Android development is prohibitive for all but the biggest companies, and a lack of available resources means that demand for native mobile apps is expected to grow 5x faster than most businesses’ internal ability to build them.

Our Xamarin mobile development and testing solution has been designed to make it easier for businesses of any size to keep up with demand - without compromising performance across the three major mobile platforms.

Visit our dedicated Xamarin page to find out more about the time, effort and money you could save or click here to download our Xamarin Services Guide.

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