The app economy is often celebrated as a symbol of innovation. However, a closer look reveals structural inefficiencies:
The average smartphone hosts around 40 apps, yet fewer than half are used regularly.
Roughly 25% of downloaded apps are used only once before being abandoned.
Almost 50% of apps on Google Play have been removed in recent years due to low quality or inactivity.
These figures raise a critical question: how many apps respond to real needs, and how many simply replicate what a responsive website or a progressive web app could already provide—at lower economic, cognitive, and environmental cost?
From the perspective of digital sustainability, app development often reflects short-term strategies or residual “we need an app” thinking, rather than genuine user value. The outcome is overproduction, digital pollution, and unnecessary resource consumption.
A short checklist for reflection:
Does your app provide functions beyond those of a responsive site or PWA?
Will customers use it on a weekly basis or more?
Can it be maintained and updated consistently?
Does it generate clear benefits for users, not only for the business?
Have its environmental and cognitive impacts been considered?
👉 If the answer to several of these is “no,” an app may not be the most sustainable choice.
At the Digital Sustainability Hub (DSH), we are investigating this issue further and developing an App Sustainability Assessment Tool (ASAT) to help organizations evaluate when an app is truly justified.