I'll Be Back: On the Multiple Lives of Users of a Mobile Activity Tracking Application
Zhiyuan Lin, Tim Althoff, Jure Leskovec

TL;DR
This study analyzes long-term user engagement patterns in a mobile health app, revealing users often re-engage after inactivity due to multiple life phases and goal shifts, with implications for improving app retention strategies.
Contribution
It introduces the concept of multiple user engagement lives, showing re-engagement patterns resemble initial engagement and are driven by changing user goals.
Findings
75% of users re-engage after inactivity
Re-engagement patterns resemble initial engagement
Users are more likely to stop after achieving primary goals
Abstract
Mobile health applications that track activities, such as exercise, sleep, and diet, are becoming widely used. While these activity tracking applications have the potential to improve our health, user engagement and retention are critical factors for their success. However, long-term user engagement patterns in real-world activity tracking applications are not yet well understood. Here we study user engagement patterns within a mobile physical activity tracking application consisting of 115 million logged activities taken by over a million users over 31 months. Specifically, we show that over 75% of users return and re-engage with the application after prolonged periods of inactivity, no matter the duration of the inactivity. We find a surprising result that the re-engagement usage patterns resemble those of the start of the initial engagement period, rather than being a simple…
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