I always question “active users”, too. A few years ago I worked for a large cable company. We put out an app for them that let users email, text and make VoIP calls. Absolutely nobody in the real world used it but the company was able to make it look like it had well over a million daily users. They offered a discount on people’s cable bills if they installed the app so a lot of people did, and then the app would ping the servers once a day and this would be logged as an “active daily user.” So the million daily users was just customers who hadn’t bothered to uninstall the fucking thing. The company veeps behind the app knew it was total bullshit, but they were just trying to justify the expense of producing the app to the higher-ups.

It’s depressing to think that I spent eight years of my career writing exactly this type of useless bullshit cable company flagship app, for many different cable companies and ISPs. At least the final year was just doing literally nothing all day while “working” from home until I was finally laid off.