Mobile

Hypercasual dominated the mobile gaming charts even before the pandemic. Installs of hypercasual games, characterized by extremely lightweight, free-to-play mobile titles, more than doubled between December 2019 and March of this year, according to joint research from Adjust and Unity. Once lockdowns started, the growth accelerated, with play sessions up by 72% in March. But […]

Gaming apps are getting better at beating install fraud. Just 3.8% of paid installs are fraudulent among gaming apps, according to research published by AppsFlyer on Tuesday, compared with 32% of non-organic installs for apps in other categories. Finance apps have the highest app install fraud rate at 48%, for example, followed by travel apps […]

Users flocked to apps during the first few months of lockdown. Paid acquisition was a bargain thanks to lower ad demand, while entertainment apps, games, fitness apps and delivery apps saw massive upticks in organic usage. Global downloads for hypercasual games, for example, shot up 103% between December 2019 and March of this year, according […]

White Ops has uncovered a mobile ad fraud operation with unusually sophisticated and patient tactics to embed itself in mobile phones, the company said Thursday. The investigation, dubbed CHARTREUSEBLUR (most of the 29 perpetrating apps used “blur” in the name, and apparently the White Ops threat research team is fond of the liqueur chartreuse), rounded […]

Companies that rely on Apple’s proprietary ad ID are seeking solutions for a post-IDFA world. Although Apple didn’t actually kill it, the IDFA will become opt-in for consumers starting with iOS 14 in September. Without user permission, IDFA tracking will be zeroed out, just like when Limit Ad Tracking is enabled. Some are predicting opt-in […]

The mobile commerce marketing company Button on Wednesday unveiled a product suite called Evolution, including pilot partners Uber Eats, Groupon and BuzzFeed, with more tools for attribution and personalization. For some marketers, the word “affiliate” has such a reputation for banality, it’s like Voldemort — nobody wants to hear the name, said Button co-founder and […]

SKAdNetwork could become the de facto way to attribute mobile app installs on Apple devices with the release of iOS 14 in September. But when Apple first introduced its SKAdNetwork API in 2018, only a handful of industry insiders paid attention. At the time, the low-key rollout of a privacy-focused test API that would allow […]

Apple didn’t kill its ad ID this week, which some see as a cause for cautious optimism. But others view Apple’s move to require an opt-in to use its IDFA as the harbinger of, well, a coming apocalypse for mobile ad tech. Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) is now essentially Apple’s default position on app tracking. […]

Google bolstered its deep linking offering on Wednesday by enabling from YouTube ads, Hotel ads, Gmail ads and ads in Discovery, which is the main section of the Google app. Previously, it had only been available in search, display and Shopping ads. The line between apps and the mobile web has been blurring for years, […]

Facebook’s Audience Network is seeing in-app bidding start to pick up some serious momentum. The number of publishers monetizing through a unified auction increased sevenfold over the past year. Half of them now earn the majority of their Audience Network revenue through programmatic bidding. “Bidding is the new normal,” said Steve Webb, global lead on […]