Two thirds of fraudulent installs come from Android devices

66 per cent of installs rejected by Adjusts Fraud Prevention Suite over the course of 2017 came from Android devices, almost twice as many as from iOS smartphones and tablets. While the larger volume of Android devices sold and the ease with which they can be jailbroken is partly to blame, fraud specialists at Adjust also pointed the finger towards click injection – a form of click-spamming that only affects Android devices.

The figure comes from Adjusts new Mobile Benchmarks report, which analyses 1.29 trillion events across 11,000 apps throughout 2017, covering 10.7bn installs. The report, which is available for free here, covers a wide variety of key metrics, with a focus on retention, network performance and sessions.

In retention, the data found that entertainment and gaming apps consistently perform best when it comes to retaining engaged consumers, but apps from all categories tend to fall to the 10 to 15 per cent retention mark by one month following initial installation. Travel apps have low retention from day one but dont decline as sharply as the others, potentially due to seasonality.

User engagement increased over time, regardless of source, with Google reaching the most engaged consumers throughout 2017. While the difference is within 0.2 range of sessions, when operating at scale, that small difference can result in big numbers. While conversion rates tended to drop over time, Google also came out on top there.

All these figures and more are available in the Adjust Mobile Benchmarks 2018 report, which can be downloaded for free here.