Every few months I sit in a meeting where an airport asks us how to get more passengers to download their app. My honest answer is usually the one they least expect: don’t. The app is the wrong tool, and the numbers have been saying so for years.
The apps almost nobody uses#
Start with adoption. Only about 7% of passengers use their departure airport’s app. Airline apps reach roughly five times more people, because you fly the same airline again and again, but you pass through a given airport once or twice a year. Across the 25 largest airports in the world, one study counted around 7.2 million downloads against a passenger base of 1.3 billion. That is not a rounding error, that is a verdict.
The ratings tell the same story. Airport apps sit near the bottom of the store, full of one and two star reviews about pages that will not load, flight data that is out of date, and logins that fail at the worst possible moment. Something like 90% of people who abandon an app say they did it because of poor performance. An airport app is a piece of software that a passenger uses for twenty minutes, twice a year, and it competes for attention with the phone they actually live in.
Airports are already walking away#
This is not a prediction, it is already happening. Tokyo Haneda pulled its app in February 2020. Frankfurt shut its down in December 2020. Atlanta and Dubai quietly disappeared from the stores. New Delhi’s went more than two years without an update and stopped working. Gatwick’s Android app was unpublished from the Play Store in early 2025. Today only about half of the world’s twenty largest airports still keep an active app alive.
The airports that made theirs work, Schiphol, Hong Kong, Changi, did it by shipping features passengers genuinely wanted: baggage tracking, fast-track security slots, a real itinerary. That takes a serious, permanent engineering budget. Most airports do not have that, and honestly most do not have the passenger frequency to ever justify it.
The real cost is not the download, it is keeping it alive#
Here is the part that gets skipped in the pitch deck. An app is not a project, it is a liability that never stops. Every iOS release, every Android version, every new phone your international passengers arrive with, is a chance for your app to break in a market you have never tested in. You are on the hook for two app stores, their review processes, their policy changes, security patching, and a support queue, forever. For a handful of airports with the volume and the budget, that might be worth it. For most, you are paying to maintain something 93% of your passengers will never open.
What passengers actually want#
Passengers do not want an app. They want the information and the functions the app was supposed to carry: is my flight on time, which gate, where is my bag, how long is the queue, am I eligible for the fast lane. They want it in the two minutes they are looking at their phone, without creating an account, without a 150 MB download over airport wifi, and without handing over their location and contacts to yet another installer.
That gap is exactly why we built PocketFlights. It gives passengers everything the app promised, flight status, baggage, queue times and more, with nothing to install. You scan a QR code or follow a link and it works, on any phone, on the first phone you have never heard of as easily as the latest flagship. There is no account, no tracking, and no privacy trade for the passenger to worry about. For the airport there is no app store to babysit and no per-device compatibility matrix to chase.
It also earns its keep on the worst day. When power or the network goes down and the displays go dark, PocketFlights becomes the channel that keeps you talking to passengers, on the devices already in their pockets. That is when a communication tool has to prove itself, and it does.
More than the app it replaces#
The point I like most is that we are past feature parity. We recently extended PocketFlights beyond flight, baggage and queue information into smart gate pre-check, so a passenger can confirm they are eligible for the automated gates before they ever reach passport control. That is more useful functionality than most airport apps ever shipped, delivered with nothing to download.
Dubai Airports launched exactly this, together with GDRFA, on PocketFlights. Their own post is below.
If you run an airport and you are still being sold an app, ask the harder question. Not “how do we get more downloads”, but “what do passengers actually need from us, and what is the lightest way to hand it to them”. For almost everyone, the answer is not an app.