Sensor Tower’s Usage Intelligence product provides unparalleled insights into any app’s user base. Here you can examine the impact of product improvements and user acquisition campaigns to see whether the number of app installs was actually beneficial to gaining loyal users. 

With Sensor Tower's Usage Intelligence product, you can follow the user's post-installation journey to closely examine user base retention and growth. Use the various modules to uncover user behavior and usage trends, including how people are using millions of apps across both stores. Monitor the user engagement levels of competitor apps to pinpoint growth or ad placement opportunities within your own apps.

These guides will walk you through each module in our Usage Intelligence product to help implement best practices and strategic decisions for your business, including: 

• Monitoring retention to see how often apps are being used post-installation
• Discovering apps with the fastest-growing user base
• Tracking engagement and demographics metrics to see which users are engaging with any apps
• Comparing usage trends worldwide to understand app popularity in various markets
• Uncovering key metrics to inform your product improvements

Our Usage Intelligence insights are powered by anonymized data we collect from our panel of mobile users worldwide. This panel is made up of over 10 million users using a diverse set of mobile apps. The data enables us to calculate and model engagement metrics, including retention, session count, and active user analysis. We collect demographic information on user ages and gender from those opting in to share this data. Our panel apps always abide by global privacy and security standards, including abiding by GDPR. 

We typically update Active Users data daily, while we update our engagement metrics monthly. Learn more →

Find Your Way Around

There are four main sections in Usage Intelligence:

Top Apps illustrates the top 10,000 most successful apps by the highest number of active users in any country or category. Start looking here to see which apps have more users as opposed to installs for any date range and which apps are acquiring the most users.

Check app usage trends in our Active Users module. Here you can break down daily, weekly and monthly active users for any app by App, Country, or Device. Use these metrics to see how often people are using apps. 

Our User Insights module lets you examine your cohort's user base by demographics including age and gender. Compare post-installation retention rates and session metrics to see how people are using a specific app. With App Overlap, you get an insight into which apps have an increased chance of use by active users of other apps. Find out which apps people are using in conjunction with competitor apps. 

Session Analysis allows you to dig deeper into tracking the engagement metrics of any app. See how much time users spend in any app and how often they open them.

Throughout Usage Intelligence, you can toggle between your preferred app store or a combined to see usage data across each store.

Metrics and Definitions

Our Usage Intelligence product illustrates how users are using any app. By diving deeper, you can understand your app's audience better and market new features around these insights.

Throughout Usage Intelligence, we use a few metrics to measure usage across both stores. We understand that the product is definition-heavy, so we've included a list of common terms below:

• A session refers to any event where a user opens an app in the foreground of their device for longer than two seconds. A session concludes when the user navigates away from the app to the home screen or another app. Subsequent reopenings are recorded as new sessions.
• Daily Active User: Any user that has at least one session on that day.
• Weekly Active User: Any user that has at least one session on a given week.
• Monthly Active User: Any user that has at least one session in a month.
• Retention measures the percentage chance of a user having a session on a specific day. Retention's defined as the percent of users who have a session with an application "x" days after installation. "Day 1" is the day the app was installed. "Day 2" is the following day and so on.
• Session Count calculates how often users have a session on the application per day, week, or month. In the platform, this is illustrated as a percentage figure.
• Session Duration is an average measure of how long people are using an app in each session. 
• Time Spent metric is an average Session Count and Session Duration. It calculates the overall amount of time the user spends within an app over the selected daily, weekly, or monthly date range. These figures include the duration of all sessions.