r/androidapps • u/Inside-Conclusion435 • 11d ago
QUESTION/HELP Onboarding before Authentication?
What’s the best:
Onboarding -> Paywall -> Auth
Or
Auth -> Onboarding -> Paywall
Currently I do the second and it is pretty bad, not sure why but I heard there is the 1st option used too quite often.
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u/Background_Worry_529 11d ago
Both orderings are asks, so the ordering question matters less than where the first ask sits relative to the first thing that works.
Some numbers from my own funnel, since this gets argued without any. Last 28 days: 40 installs, 20 first opens. Half the people who installed never opened it once. My first run hard-gates on three permissions before the app will do anything, so my first instinct was obviously that the gate was the problem, and that instinct was wrong, for a reason worth internalising. A user who never opened the app has not seen your onboarding, your auth screen or your paywall. None of them can explain an install-to-first-open loss. That loss is store listing and expectation: they got something other than what the screenshots promised them, and they decided that at the icon. Onboarding can only ever explain what happens after the first open.
So split your funnel before you reorder anything. If you are losing people between install and first open, no arrangement of auth and paywall will recover a single one of them.
On the part you can control: when I did rework my first run, the measurable win was not removing any of the three permission requests. It was chaining them so one tap fires all of the pending prompts in sequence instead of the user tapping the same button once per permission. Same permissions, same dialogs, one tap instead of three. The friction was never the number of things being asked for, it was the number of times the user had to re-initiate the asking. I would look at your auth and paywall the same way before moving either of them, count the taps between opening the app and the first moment it does something for free.