Report finds that chances of pharma companies creating a successful app are declining

A report, recently published by Research2Guidance, has revealed that despite there being an increase in the number of apps active on download sites most struggle to gain significant downloads within target groups.

Within the report, titled ‘2nd edition Pharma App Benchmarking 2017’, figures show that a mere 0.5% of apps published by the top 12 pharma companies in 2016 achieved 100,000 downloads or more, which is lower than the figure found two years prior (2014) of 2%.

The main reasons behind the low download levels are highlighted as increasing competition within the mobile health (mHealth) market, narrower target audiences for the pharma apps and lower quality of the pharma apps when compared with other competitor mHealth apps.

However, the report is not all doom and gloom for the industry. In particular, Johnson&Johnson achieved success producing three of the most downloaded pharma apps for the year 2016. This success in apps has also helped improve the overall portfolio performance as well.

Additionally, the report analyses third party digital activities and strategies of the companies, which can give insight into which channels offer the greatest benefit to pharma companies within this field.

The report is available for download costing from €1,890 from Research2Guidance.