Delivery model

75% of apps never get a second tap.

AppsFlyer and Adjust publish retention benchmarks across tens of billions of mobile installs every year. Day-1 retention sits around 25%. The other three quarters are a leak. AR apps sit below that floor, because every reviewer is a single-use case, not a habit. WebAR and browser-based 3D avoid the app install step.

You ran a campaign. The campaign got the user to tap "Get". The App Store opened. The user installed. Then the user did not come back.

AppsFlyer's 2025 benchmarks, drawn from 28 billion app installs, put Day-1 retention at roughly 25%. Three out of four people who installed your app today do not open it tomorrow. By Day-7 it is closer to 12%. By Day-30, 6%. The numbers do not change much across categories. Games trend lower, finance trends slightly higher, but the shape is the same.

Source: AppsFlyer, app uninstall and retention benchmarks.

Source: Adjust, Mobile App Trends 2026.

What this means for an AR campaign

An AR app is a particularly bad place to be in this funnel. The user did not install your app to use it every day. They installed it to look at one thing, once, in one location. That is a single-shot session by design. The benchmark assumes habitual use.

In practice the drop-off compounds. The user has to find the AR thing again inside the app, often after walking away from the activation. They have to re-grant camera permissions. They have to navigate the app's interface. Each step costs intent.

WebAR skips the install step

A WebAR experience opens from a link. Browser-based 3D works the same way on phone or desktop. There is no app install step, no first-open delta, no second-session retention metric to lose before the actual experience has started.

flyAR is web-first always, unless the case explicitly demands other solutions. Web-based 3D and AR open straight from a link or a QR code, with no app to install. The math has been the same for years. It just took the industry a decade to publish the data.

Where this fact is useful

If you are deciding whether to build a campaign as an app or as WebAR, the AppsFlyer number is the cleanest place to start. The next question is whether your experience needs anything an app can do that a browser cannot. For 90% of the AR work we ship, the answer is no. For the other 10% we say so on the first call and quote a different price.

Project where you are not sure whether AR is the right call? Send a project note. We will tell you on the first call.