App stickiness

App stickiness describes how frequently active users return to an app and use it within a given period. A common way to measure it is the DAU/MAU ratio, which compares daily active users with monthly active users. Mixpanel’s guide to daily active users defines this ratio as a measure of how often people engage with a product. An app with 100,000 monthly active users and 20,000 daily active users has a DAU/MAU ratio of 20%, meaning the active audience on an average day represents one fifth of the monthly active audience.

Why Is App Stickiness Important?

Stickiness gives product teams an early signal that users have found recurring reasons to open the app. AppsFlyer’s 2025 uninstall report, based on 1.3 billion installs and 402 million uninstalls, found that uninstall activity is concentrated heavily at the beginning of the customer lifecycle, with the largest volume occurring on the first day. A product manager should therefore look at whether users complete a useful action early and then repeat it, instead of treating every app open as evidence that the product has become part of their routine.

App Stickiness vs. User Retention

App stickiness and user retention both describe repeat usage, but they answer different questions. Retention measures whether users come back after a starting point, while stickiness measures how frequently the active user base returns during a period. Retention needs to be interpreted according to the product and its normal usage pattern, so a banking, travel, grocery, and social app should not automatically target the same return frequency.

A user can therefore be retained without being a daily user. Someone might open an insurance app only when managing a policy, while a messaging app may be useful several times every day, so comparing their DAU/MAU ratios without context tells a product manager very little. Start by defining how frequently a successful customer normally needs the product, then use stickiness to see whether actual behavior is moving toward that pattern. InAppStory’s guide to increasing app stickiness covers the same distinction between repeat use and retention.

How to Calculate App Stickiness

The basic formula is DAU ÷ MAU × 100. Before calculating it, define what “active” means: a growing active-user figure can hide weak product usage when the counted users are not experiencing meaningful value. A food-delivery app might count a user who searches restaurants or places an order, while counting a background app launch could inflate the metric without telling the team anything useful about product engagement.

DAU/MAU should also be read together with the actions those users perform. If stickiness rises because people repeatedly open the app to check whether a broken feature has started working, the ratio improves while the customer experience has not. Track the frequency of core actions, sessions per user, retention, conversion, and revenue alongside DAU/MAU so the team can see whether more frequent visits also produce useful customer and business outcomes.

How to Improve App Stickiness

1. Help Users Reach Value Early

Users need to understand what the app can do for them before there is a reason to return. Amplitude’s activation guidance connects early product value with later retention and recommends examining whether new users complete the action that demonstrates the product’s purpose. Improve this part of the journey through clear mobile app onboarding, then use Stories or contextual guidance to introduce the next relevant action after the first one is complete.

2. Give Users Useful Reasons to Return

Frequent communication cannot compensate for a product that has no recurring use case, so start with the actions customers genuinely need to repeat. A grocery app might make previous orders easy to reorder, a finance app can surface current spending information, and a mobility app can keep useful trip or service information available between transactions. In QIC’s case, insurance purchases and renewals are naturally infrequent, so the app uses Stories, loyalty content, referrals, travel services, and other app features to give customers useful things to discover between insurance transactions.

3. Use In-App Communication According to the User’s Context

Different communication formats can support different parts of repeat usage. In-app Stories can explain features or publish fresh content, while pop-ups, bottom sheets, and full-screen messages can respond to a specific action during the session; banners keep an ongoing feature or campaign visible without interrupting the current task. An in-app game can add a reason to participate in a seasonal or loyalty campaign, while push notifications can bring opted-in users back when something relevant has happened outside the active session.

The trigger matters as much as the format. InAppStory’s in-app messaging guide recommends connecting messages with clear events including app launch, checkout, or feature use because random or excessive prompts add friction. Stop a reminder after the user completes its action, avoid presenting several formats for the same campaign at once, and treat message clicks as an intermediate metric until product data shows that users continued to use the app.

4. Personalize Repeat Visits

A return visit should reflect what the user has already done. Adjust reported that e-commerce installs were down 14% while sessions were up 2%, and its shopping-app analysis pointed to personalization and connected customer journeys as areas of growing importance when teams work with an existing audience. For a retail app, that could mean showing a recently viewed category through a Story, keeping an unused loyalty benefit visible in a banner, or using a bottom sheet to continue an unfinished task instead of showing the same home-screen promotion to every customer.