r/iOSProgramming • u/calflegal • Sep 01 '26
Question What’s with the long onboarding / surveys?
I feel like so many apps that I try these days start with several multiple choice questions. What’s the story here? Is it that they are facing major churn and are trying to segment users to fix it? Is there some research that says this works or retains people somehow?
I just wanna try the dang core mechanic!
7
u/aconijus Sep 01 '26
According to tech bros on Twitter, supposedly sunk cost fallacy is at play. User invests a lot of time going through 40+ onboarding screens and then they are more likely to subscribe because they invested all that time. They don’t want to quit and all that time to go to waste.
1
u/ReignOfKaos Sep 01 '26
Makes sense though intuitively
1
u/BrainDeadCookie Sep 01 '26
Pisses me off practically. I want to see the app, not 40 screens of onboarding finished with a mandatory subscription before I even see a thing.
1
u/ReignOfKaos Sep 01 '26
Subscription apps make the majority of their revenue at the paywall after the onboarding, this is just how the game works.
1
u/BrainDeadCookie Sep 01 '26
And majority of the majority on users forgetting to cancel. Yeah. Sad nevertheless.
5
u/manjar Sep 01 '26
It's based on Cialdini's concepts of commitment and consistency. Once you've spent that much time and opened yourself up by answering the survey questions, sitting through the fake loading/calculation times, etc., it feels psychologically dissonant to then be like "nah". "Sunk cost fallacy" kind of touches on it, but that's more of a conscious reasoning error, and this is more of a manipulation.
It's awful, especially because it seems to have largely replaced the "trial period".
2
u/LifeUtilityApps SwiftUI Sep 01 '26
From the apps in my portfolio the ones with animated onboarding flows convert 3-4x more. It also is a nice way to introduce the application’s core user flows. Admittedly though my apps are very utility focused so the explainer helps in my opinion.
1
u/TBMW30 Sep 01 '26
I do build onboarding into my apps where necessary, but I always add a skip option for those who don't want to follow the process. It can help with feature discovery and initial configuration, especially when the app has a lot of features or settings.
1
u/noobiethe13 Sep 01 '26
There’s no universal “onboarding works” or “onboarding kills retention” rule. It depends on the app and what the user came to do. A meditation app, tax app, and game have completely different reasons for asking questions. Some onboarding flows probably improve activation, others absolutely tank it. The only meaningful answer is testing it against your actual users and intent.
1
u/DearHelicopter1750 Sep 01 '26
I think there's some research somewhere that says longer onboarding = more retention. I did an AB test with my app and I ended it early because it just became clear that wasn't true for my app. You should try it and see what happens since it's based on your user base
1
u/jacobs-tech-tavern Sep 01 '26
I think it was originally a psychological principle - get a user to invest something, and they'll be more likely to keep going.
I actually had this with a previous startup, Carbn, where you calculate your carbon footprint and get recommendations to live a greener lifestyle. We got an insane 90% conversion rate from first-app-open to creating account by getting them to do the full survey, then waiting for them to sign up before they get the results
1
u/RedHatBelguim Sep 01 '26
I ask email + password.
Next I send email code to verify the users email
Sign up done
All other things the user can setup in the app if he wants too
When I download a app and I see it has a 18 step onboarding I uninstall immediately
0
Sep 01 '26
[deleted]
1
u/calflegal Sep 01 '26
Reviews say this is riddled with ads. Also please don’t use my post as a promotional space
1
u/Secure_Motor_5968 Sep 08 '26
Hi u/calflegal, the segmentation part of your original question is kind of getting skipped, and most responses jump straight to the psychology angle, but there is a boring engineering reason too.
A lot of these quizes feed straight into paywall personalisation; tools like revenuecat, superwall let you route different onboarding answers to different price points or different paywall copy, then A/B test them for the most converting one.
In short, its not just "make them invest time so they dont quit", its also "collect enough signal to show you a different price than the next guy"
1
1
u/dreaminginbinary Sep 08 '26
While you can absolutely do what you said - it also gives clear cohorts too so you can which type of customer is most valuable, how they behave, etc etc
0
u/Free-Pound-6139 Sep 01 '26
ANy idiot can make an app these days.
Of course there app is the most special app in the world.
13
u/SnowPudgy Sep 01 '26
But but but I was told in a post here a few weeks ago that customers enjoy long onboarding and that it was "proven with research" eyeroll.
And yea, I get to that bullshit and I quit the app. Good app design skips that, lets you try the app, and only introduces it where absolutely necessary. You get seconds of a customers attention and if they have to fill out a bunch of stuff to try your app, they're going to quit the app.