Installs Are Up. Retention Is Down. Now What? đ¤
A closer look at the shift from install-focused growth to retention-led strategy, from conversations at App Growth Summit Africa.
Hereâs a quick TL;DR of whatâs below:
The install isnât the win; most users drop off at first open, registration, or first transaction, leaving only a small retained cohort by Day 90.
Africaâs mobile opportunity is huge, but rising CAC and early churn mean acquisition without retention is becoming increasingly unsustainable.
Retention is being hurt by siloed teams, where Marketing chases installs, Product ships features, and Tech builds in isolation from business goals.
The âsuper experienceâ gap is real, with most companies overestimating their UX while failing to identify stickiness, core actions, and true âahaâ moments.
Attribution is shifting toward reattribution, retargeting, and re-engagement, especially as churn happens quickly and many users can be won back.
Ready? Let's get into it đ
AGSA 3.0 just happened in Nairobi, and instead of giving you the usual âyou had to be thereâ recap, Iâm going to tell you plainly what actually came up in the room and why the conversations felt more honest than most marketing events iâve been to.
It was a day of very real admissions. Across panels, chats, and side conversations, one theme kept resurfacing: getting the user is no longer the hardest part. Keeping them is.
The Reality Check We Needed
Maxime Calot, our CEO, stood on stage and dropped the reality check we all needed. The macro numbers in Africa are a dream: 540M smartphone users, heading to 900 million by 2030. Kenyaâs ad market is hitting Ksh 33.9 billion this year. And with conversion rates for apps being up to 3x higher than mobile web, the prize is worth the effort.
But here is the invisible effort we arenât talking about: Out of 5 million exposed users, we lose 90% at the first open. Then we lose 75% at registration. Then 60% at the first transaction.
By Day 90? We have 10,000 users left.
We trust the repetition of buying ads. We donât trust the hard work of fixing the product.
The Silo Tax
The solution Maxime proposed isnât a new shiny tool, but a structural shift. User retention sits at the crossroads of three key teams: Tech, Product, and Marketing. Yet, most of us are siloed vertically and horizontally.
Marketing is usually off chasing awareness and acquisition, focused on clicks and installs.
Product is trying to deliver âdelightfulâ experiences but often lacks the marketing insights to know what actually brought the user in.
Tech is often the gatekeeper, building features but disconnected from the actual business goals.
When these teams donât blend, you get âad-supportedâ strategies where everyone is busy but nobody is talking. The brand team hits their awareness targets, the growth team hits their install targets, and the CVM team is left trying to win back users who were never properly âactivatedâ in the first place.
The âAhaâ moment isnât a lucky break
Emrah Ăetin from Amplitude brought the receipts on why your âSuper Experienceâ is probably a myth. He talked about the Delivery Gap.
80% of companies believe they deliver âsuper experiencesâ when only 8% of customers actually agree.
That gap is where your budget goes to die.
Emrahâs message was clear: if you donât get at least 7% of your original cohort of users to return by Day 7, youâve already lost the long-term retention game.
You have to build for Stickiness, which Amplitude defines as the days a user performs a critical event within a week or month.
Itâs not enough to hope they stay. You have to find the âAhaâ moment.
â Step 1: Understand your product usage interval.
â Step 2: Identify your stickiest features via an engagement matrix.
â Step 3: Use gamification and incentivesâlike time-limited discountsâto motivate return.
The "Three Golden Rs" of Attribution
Then Mert AltunkaĹ from Adjust stepped up to tackle the attribution elephant. With the Kenyan digital ecosystem becoming a maze, weâve been chasing the ghost of âperfectâ tracking.
Mertâs take? Stop. Instead, focus on the Three Golden Rs:
Reattribution, Retargeting, and Re-engagement.
Most users churn. Itâs a fact. On average, it takes just 6 days before a user loses interest in an app. But here is the opportunity: 40% of users who uninstall will actually redownload it if you give them a reason.
â Are you tracking uninstalls?
â Are you using deep links to create a seamless ad-to-app journey?
â Are you protecting your spend? Real-time fraud prevention should reject fraudulent installs before you pay for them.
If you arenât, youâre losing users to friction you didnât even know existed. Mert reminded us that attribution isnât about claiming credit but about empowering UA efforts to make data-driven decisions that actually impact ROI.
The Panel: Ending The Blame Game
We closed with a panel featuring Edna Maritim and Jason Masai, which finally addressed the elephant in the room: the âBlame Game.â You know how it goes, Marketing says the leads are âhigh quality,â and Product says the users just arenât engaging.
The consensus was that if Marketing is only optimising for CAC and Product is only optimising for feature releases, nobody is actually optimising for LTV.
Scaling acquisition before retention is stable isnât just aggressive; itâs burning money. One of the best takeaways was a warning against ânervousâ metrics, things like huge volume or suspiciously low CPI. If these look too good to be true while your retention is flatlining, you arenât growing; youâre just inflating a balloon thatâs already popped.
The panelâs challenge to the room was simple:
If you removed your attribution tools tomorrow, would your team still know whatâs working? If the answer is âno,â your teams arenât integrated, theyâre just dependent on the same dashboard.
You came, you saw, you networked đđž
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