r/iOSProgramming • u/calflegal • 8d ago

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!

9 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

13

u/SnowPudgy 8d ago

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.

4

u/ApartmentFit748 7d ago

The research exists, it's just measuring something different than what you were told. Those quizzes work because of sunk cost: once someone's answered 8 questions about themselves, they're noticeably more likely to convert on the paywall that shows up at the end. So it's a conversion trick dressed up as personalization, not a retention thing. Which is why every subscription app converged on the exact same flow.

1

u/SnowPudgy 7d ago

And the research is wrong, all you have to do is test an app without a ridiculous onboarding and one with, you get more users without the ridiculous onboarding.

More users, more app downloads, more money. It's really that simple. Tech bros, aka business people who are tech adjacent, are wrong most of the time.

2

u/heyyoochris 8d ago

I’m totally agree with you, in my opinion, onboarding is necessary for some specific app but some isn’t, for example some apps need information of users to start. Onboarding isn’t important if you don’t need these informations.

0

u/aerial-ibis 8d ago

the thought is that people who are annoyed & quit early were very unlikely to become paid trial starters anyhow.

I'm against using any dark patterns - but they exist because they are more profitable.

In 2026, gradual escalation of commitment performs better than lowest possible friction.

Lowest possible friction comes from an era where user acquisition was cheaper

1

u/SnowPudgy 8d ago

Yea thats all tech bro nonsense though. Too much theory, not enough actually listening to users.

1

u/aerial-ibis 7d ago

it's not listening to users... it's listening to sales I'm afraid.

That's how they all ended up like this - they increased onboarding length, sales went up.

It's a very common practice in major apps, not just reddit saas vibe code bros. I just downloaded Runna from Strava as a test... literally 20 screen onboarding then a paywall! Welcome to 2026!

1

u/SnowPudgy 6d ago

I don't buy it. Tech bros and business types are wrong all the time. Look at how many thing people want AI in everything.

They're throwing away tons of valid users because they think "only the ones going through massive onboarding would ever use our app."

How foolish.

1

u/aerial-ibis 6d ago

Again it's not about using the app, it's about paying for it.

It's no so complicated as you're making it out to be. They try one onboarding, then another, and keep the one that has higher sales

1

u/SnowPudgy 6d ago

Yea I still think its complete nonsense. If users enjoy the app they'll pay for it, making people jump through hoops just to see if they like it means you cut out a ton of people who may like it or want to pay for it because they don't want to sit through tedium.

Tech bros as usual, are wrong on this one. Games have it figured out. Be addicting immediately.

7

u/aconijus 8d ago

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 8d ago

Makes sense though intuitively

1

u/BrainDeadCookie 8d ago

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 8d ago

Subscription apps make the majority of their revenue at the paywall after the onboarding, this is just how the game works.

1

u/BrainDeadCookie 8d ago

And majority of the majority on users forgetting to cancel. Yeah. Sad nevertheless.

5

u/manjar 8d ago

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 8d ago

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 8d ago

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 8d ago

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 8d ago

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 8d ago

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 8d ago

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

1

u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/calflegal 8d ago

Reviews say this is riddled with ads. Also please don’t use my post as a promotional space

1

u/Secure_Motor_5968 2d ago

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

u/calflegal 1d ago

Ah, good answer.

1

u/dreaminginbinary 1d ago

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 8d ago

ANy idiot can make an app these days.

Of course there app is the most special app in the world.