I have google analytics set up for my app.
Let the lifespan of a user be the time difference between the last hit and the first hit it sent during certain period (i.e. during 2016). I want a histogram of the number of users for each range of lifespan.
For example:
[1 - 30) days => 10 users
[30 - 60) days => 8 users
[60 - 90) days => 9 users
...
The closest thing in Google Analytics is the Frequency and Recency report. It can be found by navigating to "Audience" -> "Behavior" -> "Frequency and Recency". It doesn't give you exactly what you want, but maybe it is close enough that it will satisfy you.
It will tell you how many sessions your users have had. That isn't exactly the same as "period between first and last activity", but it will give you an idea of how often they are coming back.
It will also tell you how many days it has been since their previous session. Again, it isn't quite what you want. You want the number of days since their first session. You can get this by clicking on "Days Since Last Session" in the "Frequency and Recency" report.
I use BigQuery now for these kind of things. I have set up my apps to export the hits to BigQuery, this is possible on recent versions of Google Analytics (I believe they call it v4). And if you want a nice dashboard maybe Data Studio could be of help.
