Retention Rate is the percentage of users still active a set number of days after install — a quality signal both app stores increasingly weigh when deciding how to rank an app.
Retention is usually quoted at fixed checkpoints — day 1, day 7, day 30 — as the share of a cohort that comes back. It's primarily a product metric, but it has become an ASO metric too: the stores can see whether the users they send you stick around, and apps that retain well tend to be rewarded with more durable rankings, while apps that churn hard get throttled. Sending traffic to an app people abandon is a bad outcome the algorithm is built to avoid.
For ASO this creates an honesty constraint. You can win installs with keywords and screenshots that oversell, but if the app doesn't deliver, weak retention drags the very rankings your metadata earned. The most resilient strategy aligns the promise in your listing with the experience inside the app, so the installs you attract are the ones likely to stay.
Example
An app that buys installs with a misleading screenshot sees day-7 retention collapse; the store reads the churn and its organic rankings slip, erasing the short-term gain.