This is shop talk, a term of art. He's talking about making your app pleasant to use and easy to understand quickly, not literally.. puff
This reminds me of the time everyone was up in arms about some article where US intelligence cryptographers were calling people "adversaries." You gotta take these things in context.
Of course, making useful things matters if your goal is to have people use your things. No sane person will argue with that. there are also people who blog about that. Also good.
This article is about when/how people drop off, given some level of inherent usefulness. How they decide whether your app is useful. It's saying most apps loose most users immediately, most of the rest shortly after then it stabilizes after a week or so. So, you need to convince users that this app is useful fast.
Obviously, in a lot of cases users download an app, see that its not useful and get on their way. Everything is a function of usefulness. No amount of attention to user on-boarding will make an app that gives you constipation popular. An app that makes gold drizzle out of the headphone jack will show you exactly how sophisticated all these supposedly tech-illiterate "late adopters" can be when properly motivated.
If your app falls in the range of apps that people might get some benefit from but don't drizzle gold, you are probably losing some potential users needlessly and to the benefit of no one.
The most obvious take away is "focus on what happens when users first open your app and make it nice." Give people a reason to come back" Why be angry about that? You'd think he was talking about a coffee shop where employees say see tomorrow, Jim. Those creepy neurolingocerobronic manipulators. I'll see you if I see you, OK! I know what you're up to and it won't work on ME! I'm on to you!!!!
So the top 100 Apps don't offer something useful? I think the point is that regardless of how useful the app is, there is decreasing engagement right away. It's best to not be demoralized by it and think through your onboarding.
The goal is not to shift the slope because that is similarly negative regardless of how useful your app is. Rather, focus on day 1 where the downslope starts at 75% vs. 50% vs. 25% retained users.
I would agree and think it's equally important to focus on flat lining retention well within 30 days. Most products that fail, fail because retention falls and falls until it hits 0. If you find product-market fit that establishes a flat line of say, 10-30% retention within ~30 days, it likely means you've found a user who actually values, and continues to value, using your product. Just my 0.02
The top 100 apps as defined by which corporate entity? I would say the lists provided to me by the system I'm invested in is almost completely useless in determining quality and usefulness. I look at the list on my phone of the "top" apps and almost all of them seem completely useless crap to me. Of course, I understand they are useless to me and everyone's mileage may vary.
It's not an either or discussion is it? I think the OP is objecting to the whole "growth hacking" tricks you can do to keep users engaged approach, but it's just a guess.
FOAD. The key is offering something useful, so you don't have to think like a crack dealer. OSMand never lost me as a user.