"Deleted app" is not necessarily a good metric, considering that I prefer to use Facebook on my mobile phone as a web page instead of the app, simply because I like it that way. It's simply a more consistent and less intrusive experience IMO. Facebook is nagging me with Facebook Lite ads because it thinks that I don't have resources on the phone to run the app, but that's not the case at all.
"Deleted app within the past year", however, is probably about as good as you're going to get. And c'mon, you know as well as I do that the percentage of people who deleted the app (especially "within the last year") simply because they prefer the web version has to be single digit percentages at best. "Yeah, but, I've got special case that I'll generalize to the population..." is not a refutation.
I don't know. I've also deleted the app but continue to use the web version of Facebook. I think a lot of people just don't use Facebook in a way that's consistent with the mobile app experience.
I'm also suspicious on principle of statistics which suggest but don't actually show what they're trying to measure. If nearly half of young adults have really stopped using Facebook, surely there's a more direct statistic showing it.
Anecdotal but same here. I've deleted the app as I didn't like how it takes too much memory (200-500MB) and syncs with the phone's photo gallery. Most of the people I know in my age group (early 20s) have also deleted the app yet still continue to use messenger and the browser version.
I would say yours is the edge case. For US users, when they see an on-screen message saying "There's way more features in the app", they go ahead and download the app, and soon forget they ever even accessed it as a mobile website. FB has deliberately hobbled its mobile site in slow increments over the years to drive the maximum possible number of users to the app.
I stopped using Facebook because of their mobile site sabotage. Switched to the desktop version on my phone for a while, but at one point I stopped and thought "why am I fighting with Facebook to use it the way I want?" And just gave up.
Self-reporting measuring how socially popular respondents think an action is vs. their actual actions is likely a more significant issue (we know this from, e.g., comparisons of actual election results to pre- and post-retirement polls; immediately pre-existing polls tend to be very close to the actual results, post election polls of how people say they voted consistently show a much better result for the declared winner than the actual election results.)
Now, we don't know how big of an effect perceived popularity has on other self-reports of past actions, but we have plenty of reason to believe it plays a significant role.
People, the concept of "revealed preferences" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference) is highly relevant here. What people say in surveys is often garbage, for all kinds of reasons, social desirability bias among them. This article is useless compared to actual measurements of people's phone and time.
It is a relevant metric since it reduces notifications being sent to you and reduces the information Facebook can gather (no tracking of what else is going on on the hone etc.)
It also tells them that the App apparently dosn't give value to users and something has to change on their side (whatever "something" might be, might be reputation or features or overall experience or ...)
I've done the same for a couple years now but it means I don't get those instant notifications, I'm not responding to anything right away. Maybe every day or two I check it for five minutes. That's not leaving the app but it's definitely not the kind of user they're looking for
