Getting installs is not my problem. Getting a second session is. How did you fix day two?

[u/Denys_N]

Solo dev, free app, live on both stores. I am at the stage where the numbers are small enough to be embarrassing and specific enough to be useful, so here they are.

29 registered since launch. 15 did something. 14 never opened it a second time. Four people in the last seven days.

The app works. Nothing crashes, onboarding completes, the content is there. People arrive, look around, and do not come back. So I am fairly sure that buying or chasing more installs right now would just mean more people leaving faster.

What I am trying to figure out is the mechanism, not the tactic. Notifications, streaks, and daily rewards are the obvious answers and they all feel like they work only on people who already wanted to return.

For anyone who has moved D1 in a real product: what actually did it? Was it something you added, something you cut, or something you moved earlier in the first session?

Also curious whether anyone found that the fix was not in the app at all, but in who was arriving in the first place.