Attendee behaviour

Do attendees actually download conference apps?

3 September 2026 · 5 min read · by Kraig Phillips, Foyer

The friction chain

Think about what you are actually asking an attendee to do when you say "download our event app". Standing in a foyer, holding a coffee and a lanyard, on conference wifi:

1. Find the right app in the store, past the similarly-named ones.
2. Wait for a download, on wifi shared with several hundred other people.
3. Grant whatever permissions it asks for on first launch.
4. Find the event inside the app, because most conference apps are containers that hold many events.
5. Enter a code, or create an account, or both.

Every step is a place to give up, and the cost of giving up is zero because there is a printed programme on the table. This is the part worth sitting with: attendees are not being difficult. They are making an entirely rational trade, and the app is losing it.

There is also a group who cannot complete the chain at all. Older devices with no storage left. Work phones with app installs blocked by IT policy. International visitors on roaming who will not download anything. Anyone who simply will not install a single-use app, which is a larger and more reasonable group every year.

The maths, plainly

Consider a 300-person conference. Suppose each step in that chain keeps four out of five people, which is generous for an app store search on conference wifi.

Illustrative arithmetic, not measured data. The point is the shape rather than the exact figures: five steps at any plausible drop-off rate compounds into losing most of the room.

Two thirds of the room is gone, and the sponsors you sold on in-app visibility are now in front of 98 people rather than 300. That is the number that matters commercially, because it is the one you implicitly promised.

Why a QR code changes the shape

A QR code that opens a web page collapses the chain to one step. Both iPhone and Android scan QR codes with the native camera, with no app in between, and the page opens in the browser the attendee already has and is already signed into.

There is no store, no install, no account and no code to type, because the code is in the URL. On Foyer, attendees are typically in within about five seconds of scanning.

It also fixes the excluded group. A work phone that blocks installs still has a browser. So does a five-year-old Android with no free storage. So does the international visitor on roaming.

The objection worth taking seriously

Native apps do have real advantages, and it is worth being straight about them. Push notifications are the big one: a web page cannot reliably tap someone on the shoulder the way an installed app can. Offline access is another, if your venue has genuinely poor connectivity.

For a multi-day conference where the same audience returns each morning and you need to push urgent room changes, that case is arguable. For a one-day event, an AGM, an awards night or a summit, the install cost almost always outweighs it, because you only get the benefit from people who installed in the first place.

What to do instead

• Put the QR where people already look. Lanyards, table cards, the back of the programme, the holding slide between sessions.
• Make the first screen useful immediately. On-now and up-next, not a welcome message.
• Do not ask for an account. Every field between the scan and the content is a place to lose someone.
• Keep the URL short and human. People who miss the QR will type it.