New report shows decrease in app launch by pharmaceutical companies

A new report published by Research2Guidance has shown that the chances of major pharmaceutical companies to launch successful apps have decreased from 2.0% in 2014 to 0.5% in 2016.

Though the companies have cumulatively increased the number of active apps available on Apple App and Google Play stores between 2014 and the first quarter of this year, most of them still continue to struggle to gain a significant number of downloads.

The report, entitled 'Second edition Pharma App Benchmarking 2017', reveals that only 0.5% of all apps produced by the leading 12 pharmaceutical companies have managed to attain annual downloads of more than 100K.

The new findings are built on figures identified from the previous edition that was published in 2014.

The 2017 report explores the major third party digital innovation strategies, their components and their success in terms of benefits.

Though the firms have on average increased their app portfolio sizes from 65 to 153 per app, downloads each year remain low at 3.3K.

The major reasons for this are that pharmaceutical companies are competing against an increasing number of mHealth competitors, pharma app portfolios have a narrower target audience than their mHealth competitors, as well as apps, on average, fall behind their mHealth competitors in terms of product quality.

In addition, the report analyses the third party digital eco-system activities and strategies of the pharmaceutical companies.