What makes a mobile app worth keeping installed?

People install thousands of applications over their lifetime, but most eventually disappear from their phones. Some apps survive because they're useful. Others survive because they're enjoyable. A few become so frictionless that users stop thinking about them at all.

For mobile developers, creating that kind of experience is difficult.

What do you think separates a mobile application that gets deleted from one people keep using?

Is it performance? Simplicity? Notifications? Offline functionality? Beautiful design? Reliability? Battery usage? Personalization? The quality of the core experience?

I'd also like to hear what developers are choosing for their stacks today.

Native Android? Native iOS? Flutter? React Native? Kotlin Multiplatform? Something else?

There are tradeoffs everywhere. Cross-platform development can speed up development, while native development can provide deeper platform integration. Some applications barely need platform-specific behavior. Others depend on camera systems, background processing, sensors, advanced graphics, notifications, or platform APIs.

What have you learned from actually shipping mobile applications?

Share an app you've built, an app you admire, or a mobile development problem you've struggled with. If you've ever had to optimize a slow application, reduce battery usage, shrink an application bundle, or work around platform restrictions, tell us what happened.