Diagnosing Broken App Growth: A Comprehensive Guide
In the realm of app development, failure is rarely sudden and dramatic. It often emerges gradually, marked by subtle signs that experienced operators can detect long before the app's performance takes a nosedive or the budget runs dry. The challenge isn't the obscurity of these signals but the tendency to rationalize them away while the app still enjoys momentum. This phenomenon was the focus of a recent App Talk, recorded at Business of Apps Berlin 2025, where Samet Durgun, the renowned Growth Therapist, offered a unique perspective on app growth.
Durgun's approach emphasizes the importance of understanding app growth as a system rather than a mere collection of tactics. Instead of prescribing optimizations, he delves into the recurring conditions that differentiate leaders from laggards across various categories, business models, and stages of maturity. This isn't a checklist of tricks but a roadmap to identifying structural issues that often precede performance decline.
Cash Flow: A Structural Constraint, Not a Finance Problem
One of the earliest warning signs emerges in the realm of timing. App businesses, especially subscription-based ones, face a structural delay between revenue generation and payout. This lag, often extending to six weeks through app stores, can significantly impact scalability if not properly managed. Durgun highlights the danger of making growth decisions without a reliable Lifetime Value (LTV) baseline, as it can deplete future runway. The issue isn't ignorance but optimism, as teams may assume the next payout will arrive on time, only to be proven wrong.
Cash flow discipline, in this context, is more about transparency than austerity. If growth requires bridging gaps, those gaps should be clearly defined, quantified, and accompanied by contingency plans, rather than relying solely on faith.
Retention: The Compound Metric
Retention is often viewed as a post-install metric, something to optimize once acquisition is stable. However, Durgun argues that retention begins from the first app open, influenced by onboarding friction, paywall clarity, perceived value, and the initial user experience. He emphasizes that retention isn't solely about day seven or day thirty; it encompasses every interaction from the first second to the user's long-term engagement.
Instead of chasing absolute benchmarks, Durgun suggests working within healthy ranges, informed by credible industry medians and top-quartile data. This approach transforms retention from a single KPI into a continuous diagnostic signal, providing valuable insights into the app's performance.
Instrumentation: Strategy, Not Plumbing
Event setup is often seen as a technical prerequisite rather than a strategic decision. However, it significantly impacts the growth system's learning capabilities. Many apps optimize around convenient signals that may not be meaningful, such as trial starts, which can mask immediate cancellation behavior. More predictive signals are typically found later in the user journey, requiring deliberate definition and consistent transmission across analytics, attribution, and media platforms.
Instrumentation failures often manifest indirectly. Teams may struggle to explain performance differences between channels, reconcile app store data with MMP reports, or adjust campaigns without understanding the correlation between behaviors and revenue. These issues rarely stem from media buying; they originate upstream, in decisions about what the system can measure.
Attribution: The Organizing System
Attribution problems are subtle and accumulate through small inconsistencies, such as delayed signals, missing parameters, or revenue visibility in one system but not another. Durgun notes that these gaps persist even at scale, highlighting the challenge of understanding which channel drives what revenue.
The issue isn't typically the tools; most stacks already contain the necessary components. The problem lies in orchestration, deciding when and how data moves between products, MMPs, and acquisition platforms. Without this map, optimization becomes guesswork disguised as analysis.
Creative Scale and the Illusion of Cheap AI
The proliferation of AI-generated creative has shifted the focus from scarcity to abundance. Volume is no longer a challenge, but the true cost of producing winning assets has become harder to discern. Creative production incurs opportunity costs, whether through human labor or machine-assisted processes. Prompting, iteration, testing, and interpretation all demand time and attention.
Measuring success by output count overlooks the crucial question: how much effort was invested to create a creative that actually performs? The more valuable metric is not cost per asset but cost per winner. Without this perspective, teams risk optimizing for throughput while diminishing emotional resonance, mistaking speed for effectiveness.
Spend Without Learning: A Warning Sign
Statistically significant data requires investment, but feeding algorithms without clear hypotheses can lead to waste. Spending without a focus on generating learning is indistinguishable from spending that fails. The warning sign is activity that increases complexity without enhancing clarity. More campaigns, creatives, and channels may result in diminishing insights into what works, making growth louder but less informed.
Product-Market Fit: An Ongoing Test
Product-market fit is often treated as a milestone achieved early, then assumed to be permanent. However, it requires constant maintenance. Markets evolve, expectations rise, and user tolerance diminishes. Apps built from genuine personal friction tend to recalibrate faster, not because they are inherently superior but because their creators directly experience the problem.
Durgun emphasizes the difficulty of knowing when an app stops helping if you wouldn't use it yourself.
Focus as a Growth Strategy
The final recommendation, as Durgun concludes, is focus. Instead of chasing new tactics, channels, or formats, the emphasis should be on what already works. Focus on the strongest product, concentrate on meaningful signals, and prioritize relevance, clarity, and value, as these remain resilient to trend cycles. In growth, as in therapy, progress often begins by understanding the underlying issues rather than adding new elements.
For further exploration of these questions, attend Business of Apps London, where these topics will be discussed in depth, live, and unscripted.
