User Retention: The Holy Grail for DApps Moving Beyond Buzzword Status

DApp projects in 2019 continued to suffer from their usual issues like poor user retention and the difficulties of navigating user interfaces, among others.

Dapp.com puts the number of newly added DApps for 2019 at about 1,450, a slight decrease from the 1,500 recorded in 2018.Figures from Dapp.com show that more than 1,300 DApps were abandoned in 2019.

"The number of active dapp users in 2019 has doubled compared to 2018, from 1.48M to 3.11M. There are 2.77M new users who experienced decentralized apps. User retention is still a problem for dapps - there are only 348K old users remaining active in 2019, accounting for 11% of all active users."

Simon Schwerin, founder of fintech consultancy firm Scalewonder, identified some of the major challenges impacting user retention for DApps for Cointelegraph.

Ease of use hampering mainstream adoption for DAppsEase of use is thus a major issue that negatively affects user retention for DApps.

The issues surrounding the ease of use not only affect user retention but also constitutes a roadblock to bringing DApps to the masses.

The user environment for DApps needs to become familiar for everyday people, which means focusing effort on simplifying the UIs of these decentralized apps.

DApps cannot achieve scale if their user base consists of a micro-niche dominated only by blockchain and web3 enthusiasts.

"Most definitely, DeFi will be part of making DApps interoperable to exchange the unique values between DApps in a P2P fashion. Automated markets running in the backend, backed by collaterals of the DApps producers."

"My forecast would be that we will see the first DApps with large user numbers on Blockstacks or other new blockchains that will then eventually move to Ethereum. These DApps will be mostly gaming related with probably DAUs of up to 100,000 if we are lucky."