There is a moment most of us have had. You open a habit tracker, a period tracker, a sleep app, and for a second you are not quite sure if it is the one you downloaded last week or the one you have been using for months. The icon looked familiar. The onboarding felt familiar. The paywall was… definitely familiar.
This is not a coincidence, and it is not anyone’s fault.
For as long as apps have been a business, the advice has been consistent: look at what is already working. Find the apps that are converting, understand why, get inspired by the patterns that have been proven. This is genuinely good advice. It is how most successful products got to where they are. Learning from what works is faster, cheaper, and less risky than starting entirely from scratch. I have followed this advice myself, and I have given it to others.
But something happens when an entire industry follows the same advice all the time. The patterns converge. The quiz-style onboarding. The projection graph that dramatically reveals your results, then changes four times as you progress through the funnel promising you that dream weight goal achieved by your next holiday. The interrupting pop-ups on pre-paywall loaders. The three-tier paywall with the annual plan highlighted and the countdown timer. The CTA copy that has been A/B tested into the least interesting version of itself. These things work, until everyone is doing them, and then they stop being an advantage. They become the baseline.
This is what “get inspired by competitors” looks like when the ‘iterate’ step gets skipped. Getting inspired is fine. Leaving it there is not. When users compare apps, they notice. Please have some ethics heart.
And this pattern goes deeper than a single screen. Look at what happened with the personalized weight-loss graph. Noom built it: a projected weight loss curve tied to a personal date, a specific goal, even a life occasion. “And reach your goal by the vacation.” It was a genuinely good idea that worked.
The copies came quickly. Almost everyone who tested it saw an uplift. The headline – “the last plan you’ll ever need” – spread across the category until almost every app in weight loss was apparently offering the definitive final solution to the human condition millions have still not solved. Most of the copies stopped there.
But one app went further. It kept the projection concept, then added intermediate weight milestones along the curve so the user could see the journey in stages, not just the destination. They did it because they knew their product well, they knew the result looked like ‘steps’ with short ‘walls’ – their users told them that in these same words. Then they placed social proof from those real users directly below the graph, at the exact moment the user might feel sceptical about whether the prediction is real. That is iteration. Same starting point, genuinely different idea, serving the user better at a specific moment of doubt. This is what I call ‘heart’.
I have worked with a number of B2C apps across health, wellness, and productivity. I have seen a lot of funnels from the inside. And what I notice more and more is that the challenge has quietly shifted. Building a well-structured app, with a clean onboarding flow and a tested paywall, is no longer what separates the apps that grow from the ones that do not. There are companies out there who have onboarding funnel constructors with proven screens, sections, even CTAs. The framework is defined – nothing to invent there.
The real question now
The harder question now is: once you have paid to get someone’s attention, what makes them remember you, choose you and stay with you?
Building has never been easier. Getting memorable has never been harder. That gap is where the real work happens now.
I want to be upfront about something before we go further. This is not a case against learning from competitors. I have spent years advising apps to do exactly that, across more than twenty products I have worked with as a consultant in the past few years. Look at what is working, understand why, adapt it for your context, move fast. I still give that advice. It is the right starting point.
But there is a step that routinely gets skipped. The “iterate quickly” part, the part where you take what you have learned and make it genuinely yours, tends to get dropped in favour of just shipping. And I understand why. You need momentum. You need to see if the model works before you invest in making it feel like something. That is reasonable.
The problem is that “making it yours” never comes after, because there is always another thing to ship. And so the app stays at the “inspired by competitors” stage indefinitely.
What I am arguing here is that making it yours is not a polishing step – it is the thing that determines whether users stay. And it has two sides, read on.
The first is internal: it has to come from what you actually believe about the problem you are solving. Why did you build this product? What did you see that others were missing? What do you genuinely think users need? That conviction, when it comes through in the product, is what makes an app feel like it was made with care rather than assembled from a template. It’s usually the gut feeling you already have but might be too worried about testing – you have my permission to go ahead and test it out – those things usually work in a surprising way.
The second is external: it has to speak to the user in their own words. Not your words about them. Their words about themselves. User research, interviews, even reading App Store reviews in your category give you the vocabulary your users actually use to describe their own problems. When that vocabulary shows up in your onboarding, in your push notifications, in your emails, users feel understood in a way they cannot quite name but definitely feel.
The practical starting point is user research: interviews, App Store reviews in your category, even the language people use on Reddit threads about their problem, tweets [see above]. That vocabulary, the words real users use to describe their own situation, is what your onboarding questions should be built from. When it comes from genuine understanding of the user rather than internal product language, users feel it. They cannot always name why an onboarding feels right. but they vote with their wallet.
That combination, believing in what you are building and speaking the user’s language, is what I mean by heart throughout this article. It is specific, and it is learnable.
The shift we’re entering: from careful to alive
Building an app used to be slow and expensive. You validated carefully, prioritized ruthlessly, shipped incrementally. RICE scores ruled the roadmap. Anything that was hard to measure (delight, tone of voice, a moment of surprise) got cut. Did not score well enough. None of the competitors have that screen. Next.
AI-assisted development, simplified releases you control on the back-end and tools that have recently emerged have dramatically reduced the cost of building and iterating. No-code tools are genuinely capable. A solo founder or an IC Growth operator can ship new concepts in days. This is exciting.
Here is the catch: distribution is harder than it has ever been.
The number of new subscription apps launching monthly has exploded: from roughly 2,000 per month in early 2022 to over 14,700 by early 2026, according to RevenueCat’s 2026 State of Subscription Apps report. App Store search is more competitive. User acquisition costs always keep climbing. Organic growth is rare and unreliable.
And many of these apps, built from the same templates and UX patterns AI picked up from apps that copied each other, end up feeling identical. AI picked the design. AI picks it for everyone. [funny story – when writing this article I gave Claude the two discharge screenshots from earlier and it immediately identified ‘the original’ and cited a pattern of what got copied and why].
The missing piece: heart alone doesn’t scale
There is a tempting counter-move, and I have seen it play out. The response to “everything feels the same” is to swing the other direction entirely: build from the heart. Make it personal. Build the app you would want to use. Obsess over the details.
This is not wrong. I am a firm believer in it, and genuinely happy we are living in a moment where building from a real place is possible again, without the six-month approval process killing the idea before it ships.
But heart alone does not get you anywhere if no one finds you. And if the people who do find you cannot figure out how to subscribe.
The apps that win in this environment need three things working at the same time:
- Something that resonates: a specific user, a real problem, messaging that lands
- Distribution: a well-tuned paid acquisition engine, a product loop that earns organic growth, or both
- A system to convert and monetize: an onboarding flow, a paywall, a pricing strategy that translates attention into revenue
Pick one and you are halfway there. Pick all three and you are dangerous.