Open a lot of second-screen or movie-companion apps for the first time, and they ask you something weird right away. How far into the movie are you? Have you seen a certain scene yet? Pick the plot point you’re at from a list. Which is a strange thing to ask someone who just downloaded your app specifically because they don’t know what happens next. You’re not there to test yourself on the plot. You’re there because you missed something, or you’re about to.
RunPee never makes that mistake. It’s built entirely around not knowing, and it has been for close to two decades now.
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The “Bad UX” Excuse Doesn’t Explain Enough
When a companion app loses people in the first few minutes, most writeups just shrug and blame “bad UX.” That’s too vague to fix. It blames the whole app when the real problem usually lives on one screen, the very first one.
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January 4, 2019
RunPee is one of my favourite apps. No more googling a film before you see it and risking spoilers, this app has everything you need to know, not just the best time to go to the toilet. Dan, the developer, also offers an amazing customer service experience. I recently switched phones, and Dan was very generous in sorting things out with me as I moved over to my current system. If you're an avid film watcher, this is the app for you!
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More precise insights come from Nielsen Norman Group’s research on mobile onboarding. Good onboarding works with what a person already knows, instead of teaching them something new right out of the gate. It definitely doesn’t quiz them on information they don’t have yet, which is exactly what most companion apps do without realizing it.
You Skip Tutorials, and So Does Everyone Else
The same Nielsen Norman Group research names this exact habit. People skip onboarding tutorials whenever they can because sitting through them costs more effort than they’re worth. Researchers call this the paradox of the active user.
It shows up constantly with a companion app that asks a first-timer to type in where they are in the movie or pick which scene they just watched. They don’t have that information. They’re not exactly eager to go find it either.
RunPee Built the Opposite Assumption In
A trivia or companion app usually assumes you already know enough about the movie to answer its setup questions correctly. But you’re sitting there, mid-movie, in the dark, glancing at your phone. You don’t know that stuff. That’s literally why you opened the app.
Founder Dan Gardner built RunPee around the opposite idea after sitting through a three-hour movie with a full bladder and zero clue when it was safe to slip out. You open the app knowing nothing, start the timer, and it tells you when a break is coming and what you’ll miss.
Not knowing the plot isn’t a problem RunPee works around. It’s the whole reason the app exists.
94% of New Users Are Gone by Day 30
Across 31 mobile app categories, the average app keeps about 25.3% of new users after Day 1, dropping to just 5.7% by Day 30, according to Business of Apps’ retention research. Day 1 is basically an onboarding report card. A steep drop right at the start almost always points to a rough first session, not some deeper flaw.
A companion app that trips someone up during setup is losing exactly the users that Day 1 measures. If people can’t use the app correctly without knowledge they don’t have yet, they’re gone before the core feature ever gets a fair shot.
RunPee’s Track Record Says a Lot
RunPee skips that friction entirely, which might explain why it’s still around since 2008 doing one thing well. It reported over 100,000 registered users around its Avengers: Endgame coverage, runs entirely on donations with no subscription tier to push, and its App Store and Play Store reviews read like people who’ve been using it for years, not people who just found it last week.
“Every time I go to a theater” and “on my phone for years” show up a lot. One reviewer mentioned finding the app as a teenager and still opening it a decade later. That’s rarely the kind of thing people say about an app they had to fight with on day one.
The Same Mistake, Just With Way More Zeros
The same bad assumption that drains a companion app’s first-session users once sank an entire streaming company. Quibi raised $1.75 billion on the bet that there was a hunger for premium, short video for those scattered pockets of downtime in a normal day, standing in a checkout line, riding a train, killing five minutes before a meeting starts.
The whole product, down to a feature that let you rotate your phone mid-video without interrupting playback, was engineered around a viewer who was out in public, killing a few spare minutes.
That bet turned out wrong, and a pandemic that erased most of those windows didn’t help. Offices emptied out. Commutes disappeared. People suddenly had entire evenings free for something longer than ten minutes. Quibi closed after six months with about 500,000 subscribers, far short of its goal of seven million in the first year.
Nobody Tested the Idea First
People who studied the collapse kept landing on the same root cause. Nobody at Quibi tested the core assumption before betting two billion dollars on it. No MVP, no small test of whether people genuinely wanted ten-minute premium video for their commute.
Everyone blames “bad timing” or “bad marketing,” and sure, both mattered some. Underneath it, the problem was the exact same shape as the companion-app mistake, just scaled up by a few billion dollars.
Prettier Screens Won’t Fix a Bad Onboarding Assumption
According to AppsFlyer’s engagement and retention research, the same pattern shows up across app categories again and again. Apps that expect users to bring outside context into their first session lose more people than apps that don’t.
A finance app assumes you know your balance. A movie companion app that assumes you already know the plot is asking for something nobody in that seat has.
A cleaner welcome screen won’t fix this. What helps is rethinking the first session around what a new user genuinely doesn’t know yet, instead of whatever’s easiest for the app to assume.
The Real Audit Question to Ask
Would a brand-new user, mid-task, realistically know what this screen is asking them? That’s the question to ask about every screen an onboarding flow shows. Go through each one and check it against a first-timer who just opened the app with zero context. If the honest answer is no, that question doesn’t belong on screen one.
If you’re building or rebuilding a second-screen product, that audit is easier with the right partner. UI/UX agencies that specialize in onboarding flows tend to catch this kind of thing faster than ones focused on general app polish, and you can browse their directory here to see who fits.
It Was Never About How Good the App Looks
RunPee hasn’t lasted nineteen years because its interface outshines apps built by teams with real budgets. It’s lasted because its onboarding never lies to itself about what a first-time user knows. That one decision, made once at the very beginning, does more for retention than any screen redesign ever could.
The lesson scales both ways. A companion app that fixes this one assumption can close a big chunk of its Day 1 losses without touching anything else. A streaming platform that never questions its core assumption about viewing habits can burn through two billion dollars, only to find out the hard way.