Background

The iOS team A/B tested the activity tab against the History tab in Q2 (T406183), and saw positive results.
Learnings from the V2 release:

• Overall retention was stable between the History control group and Activity variant group
• The variant had a 18.6% higher account creation rate for logged-out engaged users compared to control.
• Users are overall satisfied with the feature (89% of the survey respondents rated the feature with a Positive or Neutral score), but we saw specific suggestions and negative feedback relating to the change from History to Activity, so there are several modifications we want to implement before scaling.

There are also further improvements we need to make to achieve feature parity with Android. We'll work to add these features, as well as respond to the feedback we've seen so far from the V2 release.

Hypothesis

Our hypothesis is 3.8.1 of the annual plan, focused on improving the retention of active readers
If we add additional modules to the activity tab and scale it to all users, we’ll see a 5% increase in overall iOS app account creation compared to baseline

How we'll measure success

Validation

• KR 1.1 5% increase in overall iOS app account creation compared to baseline (November 2025)
  • Accounts created /users active that month (Similar to A/B test analysis)

Guardrails

• GR 2.1 Account creation success rate for users who start creating their account form the activity tab is not lower than 30%
• GR 2.2 No more than 10% of users turn the feature completely off
• GR 2.3 At least 80% of survey feedback received is positive or neutral

Curiosities

• CR 3.1 - What % of all new accounts came from the Activity tab?
• CR 3.2 - Was their retention or engagement different from accounts created elsewhere?
• CR 3.3 - How many new accounts made an edit, or saved an article?
• CR 3.4 – What % of people switch their Activity Tab experience to something other than the default? Which modules are people turning off and at what rate?

Required tasks

• Fix article syncing bug in timeline T411878: Activity timeline: Synced articles appear on day of import, not day originally saved
• Edit modules T408650: [L] Activity tab (user story) - Most viewed edits & contributions this month from Growth API
• T409597: [L] Activity tab (user story): Add edits to timeline
• T413896: Show onboarding screen
• T412046: Improve navigation of Articles read > Timeline
• T407672: [M] Activity tab (user story): Infrequent reader/editor (empty states)
• T414817: Extend the Activity tab survey until April 15
• T414233: [S] Instrumentation for Activity tab V3 completed user stories
• T414224: [S] Remove feature flag and show activity tab to all users

Nice to haves

• T407678: [M] Activity Tab (user story): Donations
• T409598: Activity tab (user story): Timeline paging
• T407679: Activity Tab: notification badge over Activity tab
• Additional edit modules T412070: Activity tab (user story) - Additional editing insights: All time impact, recent activity, views
• T412049: [M] Add long-press of items in Activity tab timeline (user story)
• T408651: [L] Activity Tab (user story): Categories explorer
• T411907: On iPad, tapping some external links fails to present the "Back" button until window is resized

Future improvement ideas

• Make activity tab graphs more interactive (1 user requested via support email)
• Allow users to clear their reading history, but maintain their activity tab totals (2 users requested in survey feedback)