The quiet week between last useful session and cancel

Cancel is paperwork. The leaving usually happened earlier, in a week when the app was still installed and no longer useful.

In membership apps we see it after a failed “aha” that nobody named: a teacher who could not export, a runner whose GPS drift ruined a Sunday, a family calendar that double-booked. The event log still shows opens. The tickets, if you keep them, start using past tense.

A diagnostic that starts at the cancel button will write a story about price. A diagnostic that starts at the last useful session will ask what broke that session. Those are different memos.

When we sample tickets, we sort by the date of last meaningful action, not by cancel date. The gap between those dates is often the only honest length of the leaving.