I am looking at a grocery list I wrote four hours ago, and I cannot for the life of me understand what the third item is. (The study of penmanship, particularly the slant of the ‘t-bars’ and the size of the lower loops, suggests that when we are in a rush, our subconscious prioritizes the act of recording over the necessity of future retrieval.)

I am a handwriting analyst by trade-Noah N.S. is the name on the door-and yet here I am, unable to decode my own nervous system’s output. I ended up buying a gallon of distilled vinegar because the shape vaguely matched, only to realize later that I actually needed vanilla extract.

We see this in the artifacts of human history, and we see it, perhaps most dangerously, in the way we measure the success of digital products. There is a specific kind of comfort in a cumulative total, a number that can only move in one direction because it is a tally of historical events rather than a reflection of current reality.

Post-Industrial Ledgers

I recently found myself at a mobile-app meetup in a space that used to be a warehouse for industrial sewing machines. (Most tech meetups in major cities are held in buildings that once produced physical goods, a transition known as ‘post-industrial repurposing.’) A founder stood at the front of the room, his face illuminated by the harsh glow of a projector that was slightly out of focus.

“We just hit 750,000 total installs.”

– The Founder, illuminated by the glow of Q4

The room erupted in the kind of polite, rhythmic clapping that people do when they want to be supportive but are also checking their watches. The next slide, however, was a curious thing. It contained no data at all. It was a list of “Feature Priorities for Q4.”

There was no account of how many of those 750,000 people had opened the app in the last week, or even the last month. There was no mention of retention (the percentage of users who return to an app after their first visit) or churn (the rate at which users stop using a service entirely). The founder had presented a ledger of ghosts. He was celebrating the ink on the page, regardless of whether the words were still legible to the people who had written them.

The Graphology of Growth

Noah N.S., who spends his days looking for the hidden tremors in a person’s signature, once told me: “A long stroke on a terminal ‘y’ is often just a reach for a future that doesn’t exist yet.” (In graphology, the terminal stroke represents how we leave a situation or a person.)

We live in a culture of accumulation. We are taught that more is better, that growth is the only evidence of life, and that a number that goes up is inherently “healthy.” But a cumulative total is a historical document, not a pulse. It registers an “install” as a permanent victory, a notch on a belt that can never be un-notched.

It doesn’t matter if the phone that housed the app is now sitting at the bottom of a landfill or if the user has moved on to a competitor. The number stays. It grows. It lends its upward direction to the very word “growth,” even when the actual life within the app is stagnant or decaying.

We see this most clearly in the way marketing budgets are allocated. There is a massive, almost gravitational pull toward acquisition-getting that initial click, that first download, that permanent mark on the tally.

There is, of course, a practical reason for this. In the ecosystem of the App Store and Google Play, visibility is often a function of momentum. If you want to purchase app installs, you are participating in a system of ASO (App Store Optimization – the process of improving the visibility of a mobile app) that requires a certain volume of movement to even be noticed by the algorithms.

(Keyword installs are a specific tactic where users search for a specific term and then download the app, signaling to the store that the app is relevant to that word.) Without that initial push, even the most useful app can remain buried under a mountain of noise. The problem isn’t the acquisition itself; it’s the conflation of that acquisition with a relationship.

Vanity Metrics & Restaurant Math

The pressure to show “up and to the right” charts leads to a kind of statistical gymnastics. If the daily active users (the people who actually use the app every day) are dropping, you focus on the monthly active users. If those are dropping, you focus on the total registered accounts.

And if all else fails, you fall back on the one number that can never betray you: Total Installs. It is the ultimate “vanity metric,” a term used to describe data points that make you look good but don’t help you make decisions. It is the equivalent of a restaurant owner boasting about how many people have walked past the front door since 1994. 14,211.

I often think about the “Lindy Effect” when I look at these charts. (The Lindy Effect is the idea that the future life expectancy of a non-perishable thing, like an idea or a piece of software, is proportional to its current age.) An app that has been on a phone for a year is statistically much more likely to stay there for another year than an app that was downloaded this morning.

But our metrics don’t reflect this. They treat the one-year veteran and the ten-second curiosity as equal units of “growth.” This obsession with additions over retentions is a byproduct of our “acquisition bias.” We find the “new” exciting. A new user is a conquest; a returning user is a chore.

The founder at the meetup eventually took questions. Someone asked about the “Day 30” retention rate. (Day 30 retention is a standard benchmark that measures how many users are still using an app a month after they first downloaded it.)

When we prioritize the visible addition over the continuing relationship, we are essentially building a graveyard and calling it a city. We are counting the bodies, but we aren’t checking for a pulse. This is not just a problem for developers; it’s a problem for the entire digital economy.

If we can’t distinguish between a download and a user, we are flying a plane with a fuel gauge that only shows how much gas we’ve ever put in the tank, rather than how much is left.

Vertical Slant & Vanilla

I went back to the grocery store today. I brought a new list, written slowly, with clear, upright letters and wide spacing. (Vertical slant in handwriting often suggests a person who is ruled by logic and self-control rather than impulse.) I didn’t want any more distilled vinegar. I wanted the vanilla.

I wanted the thing that actually adds flavor, the thing that stays in the pantry and gets used again and again. As I walked through the aisles, I thought about that founder and his slide deck. I wondered if he had ever considered the “Total Uninstalls” metric.

We need a new way of measuring health. We need to stop looking at the “Total” and start looking at the “Now.” Because the “Total” is a lie we tell ourselves to feel like we are moving, even when we are just standing still, watching the ink dry on a page that no one is reading.

Because at the end of the day, an app is not a collection of downloads. It is a collection of habits. And a habit is something you do twice. 9.

The ink on my grocery list didn’t fail me; I failed the ink. I treated the act of writing as the end goal, rather than the act of communicating. We are doing the same thing with our digital lives. We are treating the install as the destination, when it is really just the front door. And if the house inside is empty, it doesn’t matter how many people have the key. 631.