Daily active users are a temperature. Useful, if you also know whether anyone cooked. In App Analytics, DAU is still treated as a verdict: the product is “alive” because the line did not fall on a Sunday. Alive is not the same as used.
Push notifications, widget taps, and a forgotten background refresh can warm the number. So can a login wall that counts a glance as a day. I have sat in rooms in the United Kingdom where a DAU dip was debated for an hour before anyone asked whether completed jobs had moved. They had not. The mood had.
Hang a job on the wall
The Metric Council asks a crude question: if we could keep only three numbers for a quarter, would DAU still be one of them? For a social surface, perhaps. For a utilities app, almost never. Replace it with a count of finished work and a quality companion — errors, refunds, time-to-complete — so the temperature has a body.
If you must keep DAU because an investor letter already married it, define the activity. “Opened” and “completed a job” should not share a nickname. App Analytics vendors will let you blur them; that is not a recommendation.
Moods matter. They just should not be allowed to wear a suit and introduce themselves as evidence.