---
title: How to make sure your app becomes popular
description: Learn how to make your app popular by aligning user experience, onboarding, app store listings and retention signals before you think about scaling.
image: https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/how-to-make-sure-your-app-becomes-popular.webp
---

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# How to make sure your app becomes popular

 Table of Contents

Apps do not typically fail because they were built badly. They fail because the people who built them confused a product with an experience. The product works. The buttons respond. The data saves. But the experience of using it, from the first screen to the fifth session, never quite earns anyone's trust or their time.

Popularity is not something you bolt on at the end with a marketing budget. It comes from the compound effect of small decisions made well across the whole product: how it looks in the first three seconds, what it asks of someone before it gives anything back, how clearly it sets expectations before anyone downloads it, and whether it does a few things well enough to justify returning.

> The products that earn loyal, daily users are the ones where every design decision works in favour of the user.

On average, 77 per cent of apps lose their daily active users within the first three days of download. Even well-built products typically see a 40 to 50 per cent retention drop after those three days, according to industry benchmarks Simon draws on regularly. The gap between 77 per cent and 40 to 50 per cent is the result of teams who understood [what actually drives someone to come back](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/5-things-that-make-the-difference-between-so-so-apps-and-stellar-apps-what-your-), and built for that from the start.

This article covers what those teams do differently, from audience clarity to onboarding to App Store presence to the signals that tell you whether you are ready to grow.

## Why Marketing Cannot Save a Bad Experience

A common assumption in early-stage product development is that poor retention is a marketing problem. The thinking goes: if the right people found the app, they would stay. So the solution is better targeting, better creative, better acquisition spend. But acquisition only accelerates the rate at which people discover something is not working. If the experience disappoints, more users means more abandonment, not more growth.

According to [Toptal's UX Statistics Infographic](https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/ux-statistics-insights-infographic), 88 per cent of users are less likely to return to an app after a bad experience. That figure does not change based on how good the campaign was that brought them in. The experience either earns the next session or it does not, and no amount of spend upstream fixes what happens inside the product.

Simon uses this figure directly when advising product teams against cramming in features at lower quality. The argument is simple: it is far better to do a limited number of things extremely well and preserve that 88 per cent than to ship ten features at mediocre quality and lose people who will not come back. A user who leaves in the first session rarely gives a second chance. Marketing can fill the top of the funnel as many times as you like. The experience determines whether any of it converts into something that lasts.

## Knowing Who You Are Building For Before You Build

One of the more reliable ways to build a product nobody uses is to build it for everyone. Not because breadth is wrong in principle, but because a product designed around a vague audience tends to solve a vague problem, and vague problems do not motivate downloads or return visits. Knowing exactly who you are building for, and what emotional state they are in when they arrive, changes every design decision that follows.

Simon's pre-launch validation checklist starts here, with a [validated user need that goes beyond](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) the founder's own experience. That means focus groups, surveys, and real conversations, before a single screen is designed, that confirm someone other than the team feels the problem acutely enough to seek out a solution. Without that, the product is built on assumption.

The audience question also shapes the onboarding entirely. [Users who actively searched for and downloaded](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-a-development-team-actually-needs-to-know-about-the-user-before-sprint-one) an app arrive with a baseline understanding of what it does. Their onboarding can focus on how to use it. Users who arrive because someone else directed them there, via a message, a referral, or a group invite, need a different kind of entry. They need to understand what the product is, why it exists, and why it is safe to use, before they are asked to do anything. Treating both groups identically is a design failure, and it usually shows up as early drop-off that nobody can explain.

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## Designing Onboarding Around User Expectations, Not Product Logic

Product teams tend to design onboarding in the order that makes sense to the product. First, set up the account. Then, choose preferences. Then, confirm settings. Then, begin. That sequence reflects how the product was built, not how a user thinks when they open something for the first time in a [state of mild uncertainty](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-curiosity-looks-like-in-a-first-session-and-why-most-products-design-past-i).

We worked on a fitness app where the team needed to gather orientation information from new users before they could personalise the experience. The questions were reasonable and the flow was short, but users were dropping off before completing it. The fix was not a redesign of the questions. It was a single line of framing added at the start, telling users how long the section would take. That small change meant people entered the process with correct expectations and in a more prepared emotional state, and drop-off fell measurably.

> Users do not abandon onboarding because it is too long. They abandon it because nobody told them what to expect.

We also looked at a meditation app during a detailed teardown where the onboarding was doing something genuinely counterproductive. The visual design, soft gradients and gentle breathing animations, was actually working well by slowing users down and creating calm. But then the app asked users to pick a goal before they had done anything: sleep, stress, or focus.

The problem, as Simon put it, is that nobody opens a meditation app for the first time because they are already calm and curious. They open it because they are anxious and need help. Asking someone to make a decision in that state adds friction, and friction increases anxiety rather than relieving it. The core promise of the product was undone in the second screen.

Before finalising your onboarding, ask five people who have never seen your product to go through it aloud. Watch where they pause, re-read, or ask a question. Those moments are where the flow is working against them.

## The Friction You Do Not Notice Is the Friction That Kills Retention

Friction is not always an error message or a broken button. Most of the friction that kills retention is invisible to the team because it is baked into decisions that felt reasonable at the time. An extra confirmation step. A permission request before the user has any reason to say yes. A registration wall before the product has demonstrated its value. Each one feels minor in isolation. Together, they make an experience that is just slightly harder than it needs to be, and slightly hard is enough to lose people.

According to [AppsFlyer mobile onboarding studies](https://sparklin.com/blog/why-users-abandon-apps-during-onboarding), users who experience friction in their first session are 2.7 times less likely to return by Day 7. The compounding effect of small obstacles in that first session is significant: a user who hits three moments of mild confusion or resistance in the first ten minutes is unlikely to return, even if they do not consciously identify friction as the reason.

One of the friction patterns Simon flags consistently is the [timing of rating prompts](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-makes-users-trust-a-product-enough-to-enter-their-card-details). On one project, a client added a rating prompt that appeared the moment a user opened the app. The user had experienced nothing yet. They had no basis for a rating, and the prompt felt like a demand made before any relationship had been established. The prompt should appear after a user has had a genuinely positive moment or completed something meaningful. Asking too early does not just get poor ratings. It creates a poor experience right where the product needs to build trust.

Review every permission request in your app and ask whether the user has experienced enough value to say yes willingly. Apps that request permissions before demonstrating value see significantly lower opt-in rates than those that wait for the right moment.

## Doing Fewer Things Well Rather Than More Things Poorly

There is a version of product ambition that looks like confidence but functions like risk. It is the version where every possible feature gets included because cutting anything feels like admitting the product is incomplete. The result is a product that does many things at a level that does not impress anyone, and users can tell. The experience feels scattered, the performance dips, and the interface fills with options nobody asked for.

Simon's position is clear here: 88 per cent of users are less likely to return after a bad experience, and a mediocre feature delivers a bad experience just as reliably as a broken one. The strategic answer is to identify what the product needs to do extremely well, protect that quality with the budget and the attention it requires, and cut or defer everything else.

#### What This Looks Like in Practice

The decision is not always obvious, but the process is. For each feature under consideration, ask whether it helps the user accomplish what they came to do or whether it exists for another reason, whether it can be done at a quality that improves the experience, and whether the budget required to do it well would be better spent deepening something already in the product. A feature that fails any one of those tests is probably a distraction.

#### The MVP Case

Simon draws a consistent lesson from projects where teams resisted releasing incrementally and tried to ship everything at once: they frequently never shipped at all. The iterative approach, building less and building it well before adding more, produces a product people can actually use and respond to, which gives the team real information to build on. A lean product done well beats a full product done poorly every time.

## What Your App Store Listing Is Actually Doing

Most product teams treat the App Store listing as a formality. The app is built, the screenshots go in, someone writes a description, and it goes live. The thinking is that the product itself will do the convincing once someone downloads it. But the listing is where the self-selection happens, and [self-selection is one of the most underused](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-your-social-media-app-needs-more-than-just-pretty-design) retention tools available.

An average visit to an app's product page lasts no more than ten seconds, according to [SplitMetrics user behaviour research](https://splitmetrics.com/user-behavior-insights-app-store-vs-google-play/), and about half of that time is spent on screenshots. By 2025, around 90 per cent of users do not scroll past the third screenshot, according to [ASOMobile's screenshot guide](https://asomobile.net/en/blog/screenshots-for-app-store-and-google-play-in-2025-a-complete-guide/). The listing has roughly five seconds and three images to communicate what the product is and whether it is right for this person.

Simon's argument is that a listing done well acts as a filter. If someone downloads an app with a clear understanding of what it does and who it serves, they open it with correct expectations and in an informed state. That alignment between what was promised outside the app and what they find inside is one of the most reliable ways to reduce early abandonment. The listing does not just drive downloads. It determines the quality of those downloads.

We worked on a gifting and wishlist platform where the client was reluctant to invest in App Store Optimisation, believing word-of-mouth referral would be enough given how social the product was. Our view was that ASO matters regardless of how people arrive: the icon, the category, the first lines of copy, and the first three screenshots all need to communicate the product clearly enough for someone to decide in ten seconds whether it is for them. A user who downloads, realises it is wrong for them, and leaves represents a retention loss that counting downloads hides.

## Matching What You Promise to What Users Find Inside

There is a gap that opens up between the expectations a product sets before download and what a user actually encounters when they open it, and that gap is where trust breaks. The listing says one thing. The onboarding implies another. The actual first session delivers something different again. Each mismatch is small, but they compound, and the user who feels slightly misled by the third screen rarely makes it to the fifth.

We built an anonymous messaging app that required users to register upfront before they could use any of it. Because we could not demonstrate value through use before registration, we had to front-load everything that would normally unfold gradually inside the product. The App Store listing, the screenshots, and every piece of copy before the app opened had to communicate the whole product proposition clearly enough to earn the registration commitment.

As Simon put it at the time, all the messaging that would normally drip-feed through use had to be delivered in the App Store presence instead. That required a fundamentally different approach to out-of-app content, and it changed how we think about the relationship between listing and experience on every project since.

The principle that comes out of this is that the [promise and the product need to be designed together](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-to-tell-whether-your-digital-problem-is-a-format-problem-or-a-brief-problem), not in sequence. If the listing sets expectations the onboarding cannot immediately meet, the experience has already failed before the user has done anything.

Read your App Store description aloud after spending two hours in your product, and ask whether each claim you make in the listing is visible within the first sixty seconds of use. If it is not, either the listing is overclaiming or the onboarding needs to work harder.

## The Signals Worth Watching Before You Scale

Scaling before a product is ready does not accelerate growth. It accelerates the rate at which more people have a poor experience. the signal for that is the behaviour of real users across their first two weeks.

#### What to Look For

The most reliable pre-scale indicators are straightforward to measure but easy to overlook in favour of headline acquisition numbers.

1. Day 3 retention: are more than half of new users returning after three days?
2. First value moment: are users completing the action that delivers the product's core promise within the first session?
3. Session depth: are users reaching the parts of the product that were designed to create habit?
4. Voluntary return rate: are users coming back without being prompted by a push notification?
5. Qualitative feedback: when you ask recent users what they liked and what confused them, are the same moments coming up?

#### The Registration Question

Simon's pre-launch checklist adds one more check worth running before growth investment begins: can a new user complete the first value-generating action in the product without hitting a wall? If they cannot, if there is a registration gate, a permission request, or a configuration step blocking the path to value, that is a retention problem that more users will not solve. Fix the path first, then grow.

Amplitude's 2025 Product Benchmark Report, cited across [SaaS onboarding research](https://www.scribbl.co/post/client-onboarding-best-practices), puts the figure at over 98 per cent of users churning within two weeks if they have not experienced value. That number does not improve with scale. It only gets more expensive.

## Conclusion

A popular app is the result of consistent decisions made in the right order, starting with a clear understanding of who the product is for and what emotional state they arrive in, through to how the onboarding is framed, what the listing promises, and whether the experience inside the app matches it.

The teams that get this right tend to share one habit: they treat the user's experience of the product as the primary design brief, and everything else, features, marketing, store presence, as in service of that. They cut what does not help the user. They frame onboarding around expectations, not product logic. They use the listing to filter in the right people rather than to maximise raw downloads.

None of this requires a large budget. It requires discipline and the willingness to do fewer things properly rather than more things quickly. A product that retains 50 per cent of its users through the first week, because the onboarding is clear and the first session delivers real value, will compound into something popular in a way that no acquisition spend can manufacture.

If you are building something and want to think through where the experience is working and where it might be losing people, [let's talk about your product](https://weareaffective.com/get-started).

## Frequently Asked Questions

Why do most apps fail even when they are well built?

Most apps fail not because of poor engineering but because they confuse a working product with a good experience. The buttons may respond and the data may save, but if the experience never earns a user's trust across those first few sessions, they will simply leave and not return.

How quickly do apps typically lose their users after download?

On average, 77 per cent of apps lose their daily active users within the first three days of download. Well-built products can reduce that drop to between 40 and 50 per cent, but only if the team has actively designed for what brings someone back.

Can a strong marketing campaign rescue a poorly performing app?

No. Marketing only accelerates the rate at which people discover the experience is not working. If 88 per cent of users are less likely to return after a bad experience, increasing the number of people who have that bad experience will produce more abandonment, not more growth.

Is it better to launch with many features or fewer, well-executed ones?

Fewer, well-executed features are strongly preferable. Shipping ten features at mediocre quality risks losing users permanently, whereas doing a limited number of things extremely well preserves trust and encourages people to return.

Why does targeting a broad audience make it harder to succeed?

A product designed for everyone tends to solve a vague problem, and vague problems do not motivate downloads or return visits. Knowing precisely who you are building for, and what they need in the moment they arrive, sharpens every design decision that follows.

What should a team do before designing any screens?

Teams should validate that a real user need exists beyond the founder's own experience. That means conducting focus groups, surveys, and genuine conversations with potential users to confirm that someone other than the team actually feels the problem the app is intended to solve.

What role does onboarding play in whether an app becomes popular?

Onboarding shapes whether a user trusts the app enough to return after that critical first session. What an app asks of someone before it gives anything back, and how clearly it sets expectations, directly influences whether users stay or leave within those first three days.

When is the right time to start thinking about an app's popularity?

From the very beginning, not at the end once a marketing budget is available. Popularity comes from the compound effect of small decisions made well across the whole product, starting with who it is for and how it behaves in the first three seconds of use.

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