Retention rate

Retention rate is the share of people who started using your app in a given period and were still using it a set number of days later. "Day-7 retention of 20%", for example, means that of the people who first opened the app on a given day, one in five opened it again seven days later.

Why it matters

Retention decides how much a download is worth. Store optimization can bring more people to your app, but if most of them leave in the first days, more downloads mostly mean more people leaving. Low retention also tends to show up in ratings, which affect search and conversion.

It depends on the definition:

• What counts as "using": opening the app, or doing the thing it is for, such as finishing a workout.
• Which day: on that exact day, or on any day up to it.
• Which group: people who installed in the same week (a cohort).

Store consoles report some retention data for opted-in users, but the definitions are fixed. A product analytics tool lets you define the event that matters for your app.

Example (a fictional app)

An indie developer's language app gets more downloads after a listing update, but subscriptions do not move. Their analytics show that most new users never finish the first lesson, and day-7 retention for the new cohort is lower than before. The listing is now promising something the first session does not deliver. They fix the first lesson before working on the listing again.

Where Indevaro fits

With PostHog connected, Indevaro measures activation and retention the way you define them; with other analytics tools it reads active users. It does not instrument your app for you, and without a connected analytics source it cannot measure retention at all.