September 2025 Summaries

Startup founders often encounter challenges when their apps fail to generate expected revenue or user engagement, leading to a cycle of developing out of fear rather than genuine demand. A crucial strategy to remedy this is testing customers’ willingness to pay before extensive development begins, as demonstrated by successful pre-launch revenue models from ventures like Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Pump app and Eric Duffett's Shot Pattern golf app. These examples highlight the importance of early validation through community engagement and strategic sharing of concepts to gauge genuine interest and commitment. Common pitfalls in demand testing include overreliance on vague positive feedback, targeting irrelevant audiences, mistaking preliminary interest for actual sales, and ineffective messaging. To effectively validate demand, startups can employ techniques such as fake door testing, paid waitlists, and pre-selling subscriptions, which gradually increase customer commitment and provide stronger indicators of potential success. This iterative process, from discovery to transactional validation, helps refine the product offering, ensuring that initial interest translates into sustainable customer retention and long-term success.

Jetpack Compose is a modern UI toolkit for Android development that supports Kotlin Multiplatform projects, with a rapidly growing ecosystem making it essential in current Android development. Central to Compose is the concept of Modifiers, which are design patterns that allow UI components to remain independent yet customizable. The article explains how to create custom modifiers using three primary APIs: Modifier.then(), Modifier.composed(), and Modifier.Node. Modifier.then() allows chaining multiple modifiers through a linked list structure optimized for UI performance. Modifier.composed() enables the use of composable functions within modifiers but can impact performance negatively if not used correctly. Modifier.Node is the recommended approach as it provides a lightweight, stateful, and lifecycle-aware way to create custom modifiers, offering performance benefits over Modifier.composed(). The article also highlights how RevenueCat’s Android SDK utilizes Modifier.Node to enhance UI performance, emphasizing the importance of understanding each API's trade-offs to create efficient and reusable UI components in Jetpack Compose.

New York App Week, taking place from October 13-16, 2025, transforms New York City into a vibrant hub for app development and growth, featuring a myriad of events such as meetups, workshops, and networking opportunities. Although centered around RevenueCat's App Growth Annual conference on October 14, which is available both in-person and virtually, participants can join various independent events without attending the main conference. These include informal gatherings like Sunday Beers and more exclusive ones such as the Apps Capital Dinner and Aperture Sessions. Activities range from a casual 5K run and 'Software Sommelier' design labs to adrenaline-pumping experiences like the City Climb and networking at the highest outdoor sky deck. App Week offers diverse opportunities for app enthusiasts to connect, learn, and grow, highlighting the importance of community in the tech industry.

Modern subscription apps significantly benefit from strategically using offers such as introductory trials, promotional discounts, and offer codes to enhance user acquisition, retention, and satisfaction. RevenueCat Paywalls streamline the process of configuring and displaying these offers, allowing businesses to reach the right customers at the right time without extensive custom coding. By leveraging the Paywall Editor, developers can tailor content based on user eligibility, such as offering free trials to new users or discounts to returning subscribers. The platform supports both the App Store and Google Play, enabling the use of multiple introductory offers and promo codes, and facilitates audience targeting to deliver personalized experiences. This approach allows for a dynamic and flexible subscription model where the same paywall can present different messages based on user segments, ultimately boosting conversions and reducing churn. RevenueCat also provides tools for A/B testing, helping businesses analyze the effectiveness of various offers and refine their strategies for optimal outcomes.

Léa Samrani emphasizes the significant return on investment (ROI) of focusing on the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework in app monetization, as opposed to merely introducing new features or designs. By understanding what users are genuinely trying to achieve, app developers can optimize elements like paywalls and onboarding processes, leading to substantial increases in conversion rates and average revenue per user (ARPU). Through her experiences advising over 45 apps, Léa demonstrates that while the JTBD approach requires in-depth user interviews and continuous experimentation, it is crucial for achieving sustainable growth. Case studies, including the Smart Tales educational app, illustrate how identifying and addressing specific JTBDs can lead to impressive outcomes, such as a 72% increase in free-to-paid conversion rates. Success hinges on a comprehensive strategy that begins with thorough user research and extends through onboarding to paywall optimization, often involving multiple iterative experiments rather than a single decisive change.

Apple's introduction of the "Slide to Unlock" feature on the iPhone was a pioneering move that emphasized intentional and engaging user interaction, setting a precedent for UI design. Although modern devices now employ swipe gestures or biometric methods for unlocking, the principle of creating intuitive and rewarding user experiences remains vital. This article explores an open-source slide-to-unlock library by RevenueCat, which can be integrated with RevenueCat's in-app purchases in Jetpack Compose, a framework for building Android UIs. The library is designed for Kotlin Multiplatform, allowing usage in both Android and KMP projects, and offers extensive customization for a tailored user experience. By incorporating the slide-to-unlock feature into custom paywalls, developers can enhance interactivity and user engagement, potentially increasing subscription conversion rates. The integration supports RevenueCat's analytics and A/B testing, allowing for experimentation with various designs and engagement strategies to optimize the purchasing experience.

Google has introduced several AI-enhanced updates to the Play Store, including a Guided Search feature that organizes search results by user goals and a new "You" tab, which serves as a personal hub for subscriptions, rewards, and recommendations. These updates aim to personalize the user experience and enhance app visibility by focusing on outcome-driven discovery rather than keyword-based searches. Curated Spaces present seasonal and thematic app collections, rewarding apps that provide fresh, themed content, while Play Games on PC enhances cross-device expectations. These changes necessitate app developers to clearly articulate the outcomes their apps deliver, optimize subscription flows, and plan thematic content updates to remain competitive. The overarching goal is to align app messaging and user lifecycle with intent-based discovery to improve visibility and growth, especially for indie developers and small teams.

Founders contemplating hiring a growth-focused individual for their subscription app must first ensure that they have achieved product-market fit, as premature hires can hinder progress rather than help. The readiness to hire also demands a solid data infrastructure for tracking customer journeys and feedback, as these are crucial for the growth hire to make informed decisions. The role's nature—whether fractional or full-time, generalist or specialist, and experienced or junior—should be carefully defined based on the company's current needs and existing team capabilities. Soft skills, including the ability to balance strategic thinking with tactical execution, openness to feedback, curiosity, and raw intelligence, are as important as hard skills like growth strategy development and data analytics. To successfully onboard a growth hire, a structured plan outlining the first 30, 60, and 90 days is essential to integrate them effectively into the company, maximizing their potential to drive growth.

Losing a customer doesn't necessarily spell the end, as businesses can implement strategies to regain them, such as win-back campaigns that re-engage users to reconsider subscriptions. One effective approach is offering discounts through RevenueCat’s Web Billing, which facilitates web-based purchases without needing a custom backend. This method allows businesses to manage subscriptions seamlessly alongside traditional in-app methods, while benefiting from lower fees compared to Apple and Google, potentially increasing revenue by 12.1-27.1%. Setting up a win-back campaign with RevenueCat involves creating a web billing app connected to Stripe, customizing web paywalls, and configuring products and offerings. Automation tools like Zapier can be used to send targeted win-back emails when subscriptions expire, directing users to a web paywall where they can easily resubscribe at a discounted rate. This streamlined process requires minimal coding and integrates effortlessly with mobile apps, ensuring users quickly regain access to premium content after resubscribing.

LinkedIn, a leading subscription app with over a billion active users, is highlighted in the Sub Club podcast featuring Ora Levit, Vice President of Product Management at LinkedIn, who discusses the company's strategies for growth and user retention. A key factor in LinkedIn's success is its value-driven growth approach, consistently adding valuable features to engage users while prioritizing free experiences that align with its mission to provide economic opportunities. Although LinkedIn is generally free, it offers premium features and bundled benefits to enhance paid memberships. The company conducts over 1,000 A/B tests annually to understand user preferences and iterate products quickly, minimizing internal deliberations and maximizing learning from user feedback. LinkedIn also addresses user churn by allowing former subscribers multiple free trials, showcasing the evolving value of its premium services to encourage them to return.

The guide offers a comprehensive overview of app monetization and growth strategies, focusing primarily on paywalls for subscription apps. It delves into the fundamentals of paywalls, differentiating between hard and soft paywalls, and discusses optimization techniques to enhance user engagement and revenue. The content includes practical resources such as blogs, podcasts, and video tutorials, exploring various approaches to paywall design, user interface, and experimentation to boost conversions. Real-world examples and case studies are provided to illustrate successful implementations, highlighting the importance of continuous testing and iteration in improving paywall performance. Key insights are shared on how to leverage tools like RevenueCat for implementing and optimizing paywalls, emphasizing the necessity of adaptability and experimentation in achieving app growth and increased subscriber numbers.

Understanding and engaging low-intent app users can unlock significant value and revenue potential, even if they don't convert to recurring subscriptions. These users, who might explore the app briefly or use it for free over long periods, require tailored strategies to be monetized effectively. Identifying such users involves recognizing their behaviors, such as skipping subscriptions during onboarding and low interaction with core features. Instead of dismissing these users, companies can adopt hybrid monetization models like ads, one-time feature unlocks, or short-term plans, which have been successfully employed by apps like Duolingo and MyFitnessPal. Moreover, reverse trials and referral programs can also convert low-intent users into valuable contributors to the app’s ecosystem by encouraging them to invite others, generating network-driven growth. Ultimately, the goal is to create monetization pathways that align with the user's experience without compromising on trust, thereby transforming low-intent users into a vital component of the app's revenue strategy.

In Jetpack Compose, stability is crucial for optimizing recomposition and UI performance, as stable objects allow the framework to skip unnecessary recompositions. Challenges arise when classes, even those with stable types, are marked as unstable if they originate from different packages, complicating multi-module architectures and library development. The newly introduced compose-runtime-annotation library offers a solution by providing stability annotations like @Immutable and @Stable without adding full Compose dependencies to unrelated modules. This library, designed for Kotlin Multiplatform, allows developers to mark classes as stable at compile time, improving performance without runtime overhead. A practical example is RevenueCat’s Android SDK, which adopted this library to enhance UI stability. While the Compose Stable Marker library served similar purposes before, the official library is preferred, although it requires a compileSdkVersion of at least 34. Additional strategies for improving stability include using a stability configuration file and enabling Strong Skipping mode, which can enhance stability without annotations but may not be sufficient for all scenarios, particularly in library development where explicit stability guarantees are recommended.

The text argues against the prevalent strategy of focusing on high-volume ad creative testing in Meta advertising, suggesting that it often leads to decreased creative diversity, burnout among creative teams, and poor experimentation practices. Instead of prioritizing the sheer number of ads tested, the goal should be to discover genuine winning creatives that can scale and improve performance. High-volume testing can dilute creative quality as teams make minor tweaks to meet targets, ultimately stifling innovation and insight. The text emphasizes the importance of maintaining creative diversity, setting clear hypotheses, and celebrating innovative efforts even if they initially fail, to foster a more effective and sustainable creative process. It also highlights the need for systematic testing strategies with appropriate metrics like win rate and cost-per-winner to ensure efficiency and guard against burnout and structural complexities in ad accounts.

The text explores the challenges and strategies of pursuing a career in mobile app development, focusing on the decision between concentrating on a single app or adopting a diversified app portfolio. It highlights the benefits of a single-app focus, such as community building, app store optimization, and creating a strong user experience, illustrated by case studies of successful developers. However, it also warns about the risks, including potential difficulties in adapting to new trends and over-reliance on one source of revenue. Conversely, the diversification approach can mitigate risks and capitalize on multiple opportunities but may dilute focus and slow down iteration. The text suggests that the best path depends on a team's strengths, iteration willingness, and financial resources, with success hinging on effective resource management and strategic risk-taking.

A dedicated F1 app user shares their journey from initially engaging with the app to build a shared interest with a partner, to becoming an avid fan immersed in the F1 community and its drama. The app serves as an emotional escape from their daily life, highlighting the importance of apps satisfying emotional needs beyond just functional purposes. Drawing on concepts like habit loops, emotional triggers, and emotional motivators, the text explores how apps can create emotional connections with users by understanding internal and external triggers. It delves into methods for enhancing retention and loyalty, such as emotional storytelling, community building, personalization, gamification, and turning app usage into a ritual. By tapping into users' emotions and aligning with their deeper desires, apps can transition from being mere tools to becoming integral parts of users' identities and daily routines.

RevenueCat is a cross-platform solution designed to simplify the complexities of managing in-app purchases and subscriptions, offering a comprehensive platform that includes versatile SDKs, scalable infrastructure, and robust analytics tools. It addresses the challenges of server-side receipt validation, cross-platform entitlements, and data centralization, allowing developers to focus on app growth rather than the intricacies of store APIs. RevenueCat is utilized by over 75,000 apps, processing more than $11 billion in annual subscription revenue for clients ranging from indie developers to global companies like OpenAI and Notion. The platform aids developers by reducing the time and cost associated with building subscription infrastructure, while growth teams benefit from its capabilities for conducting data-driven experiments, optimizing conversion, and improving retention. By providing tools for product managers to enhance conversion, retention, and lifetime value (LTV), RevenueCat positions itself as an essential infrastructure component for sustainable app growth.

App store ratings play a crucial role in app conversion rates by influencing user trust and visibility, with higher ratings often leading to increased downloads and organic growth. Despite good apps sometimes struggling with low ratings due to the tendency of dissatisfied users to voice negative feedback more than satisfied ones, capturing positive reviews is essential for growth. Developers can improve ratings by timing review prompts to coincide with peak user satisfaction moments, using strategies like building a "customer satisfaction engine" that tracks user interactions and prompts reviews only after meaningful actions. While some tactics, such as "review gating," are prohibited by app store guidelines, ethical practices that encourage satisfied users to share their experiences can create a positive feedback loop, enhancing ratings and driving further growth. By responding to user feedback and leveraging AI-driven review summaries, developers can better understand user sentiment and strategically prompt reviews, ultimately fostering a cycle of higher ratings and increased user acquisition.

The guide provides practical advice on creating a compelling Devpost submission for the Shipaton competition, emphasizing the importance of storytelling over mere feature listing. It underscores that a successful submission should include a clear text description of the app's features, a demonstration video of up to three minutes showing the app in action, and adherence to copyright rules. The guide introduces the Story Circle, a storytelling framework developed by screenwriter Dan Harmon, to help developers build a narrative that highlights the app's value and impact through a relatable protagonist's journey. This method involves framing the problem, demonstrating how the app addresses it, and concluding with the transformation it enables. By focusing on storytelling, the guide suggests that developers can make their submissions more memorable and engaging for judges, thereby enhancing their chances of standing out in the competition.

Over recent years, consumer app revenue has been growing faster than gaming revenue, a trend that became particularly pronounced post-COVID as gaming revenue stalled. This shift, highlighted by various reports, is more nuanced than it appears, with significant regional differences; for example, non-gaming app revenue surpassed gaming in the US and India, while countries like South Korea and Japan still heavily favor gaming. The app market is also characterized by a power-law distribution, where a small percentage of top publishers, mainly in Social & Entertainment, dominate revenue. Furthermore, revenue figures are often estimates and do not account for in-app advertising or off-store monetization, which has been rapidly growing in both gaming and non-gaming sectors. This trend of non-gaming growth is thus real but complex, with many factors influencing the apparent shift in app revenue dominance.

Price localization for apps involves adjusting pricing strategies to maximize revenue in different global markets, a concept highlighted by contrasting the inflated cost of airport water to app pricing dynamics. While Apple and Google offer automatic localization, these default methods often overlook crucial factors such as local spending power and perceived value, leading to suboptimal conversion rates. This text emphasizes the importance of considering international traction, market positioning, pricing mismatches, and implementation costs when localizing app prices. It critiques traditional pricing methodologies like competitor and cost-based pricing, pointing out their limitations in reflecting true market value. The guide suggests a more nuanced approach, starting with optimizing prices in the primary market and then building a custom pricing index by benchmarking against globally successful apps with similar business models and target audiences. It underscores the need to consider factors like perceived value, market-specific costs, and the potential benefits of tailoring subscription options to local purchasing behaviors. The process is framed as a significant opportunity for app developers to enhance revenue without adding new features, especially in rapidly growing markets like Brazil, Mexico, and South Korea.

Eric Seufert, a quantitative marketer and media strategist, shares insights on optimizing return on ad spend (ROAS) for app marketing in a Sub Club podcast episode. He advises against diversifying ad spend just for the sake of diversity, recommending instead a strategic allocation using a waterfall method that maximizes each channel until it meets the ROAS threshold, thereby minimizing overhead and complexity. Seufert identifies measurement disorganization as a major pitfall for growth teams, suggesting the need for a coherent measurement plan that satisfies all stakeholders. He emphasizes the importance of identifying losing creatives quickly to optimize ad spend, advising a methodical increase in ad spend based on data-driven insights and tracking ROAS across various cohorts. The podcast episode covers these topics in detail, offering actionable advice for app marketers looking to enhance their strategies.

RevenueCat has launched the MCP Server, now in public beta, which allows users to manage subscription configurations through AI assistants using natural language, eliminating the need for dashboard navigation. Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for AI integrations, RevenueCat is the first subscription management platform to implement AI-native configuration, enabling seamless subscription management across platforms like iOS, Android, Amazon, Stripe, and Roku. The MCP server allows users to create subscription products, configure entitlements, set up offering hierarchies, and generate paywalls all in real time through their AI tools. Integration is straightforward with support for popular AI clients like Claude Code, Cursor, and Visual Studio Code, and offers two authentication methods: API v2 Secret Key and OAuth. Although currently, it only allows configuration within RevenueCat and not direct product creation in external stores like App Store Connect or Google Play Console, tighter integrations are in development. The new server aims to streamline workflows by reducing context-switching for developers and product teams, promoting faster and more efficient subscription management.