AppsFlyer report flags diverging APAC app growth trends

AppsFlyer has published its State of Marketing in APAC 2026 report, which identifies diverging trends in installs, retention, paying users and fraud across the region's app economy.

The study draws on 30 billion installs across nearly 12,000 apps in finance, shopping, entertainment and gaming, alongside USD $6.7 billion in user acquisition and remarketing spend. It covers activity across the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea, and Australia and New Zealand over a two-year period.

Its central finding is that app marketers can no longer rely on install growth alone as a proxy for business momentum. In several markets, categories that added users struggled to convert them into paying customers, while others saw falling install volumes alongside stronger monetisation.

Finance and gaming offered the clearest contrast. Finance installs rose across APAC, helped by broader adoption of digital payments, while gaming recorded declines in Android installs across every APAC sub-region.

Yet the revenue picture moved in the opposite direction. In finance, the share of paying users fell in some of the category's strongest Southeast Asian markets, including Indonesia, even as user growth continued. In gaming, the share of paying users increased across every region and platform despite lower install numbers.

In India, finance organic installs on Android rose 55%. Across the broader Indian Subcontinent, the same metric increased 46% on Android.

Gaming's Android installs fell by 17% to 26% across all APAC sub-regions. At the same time, its share of paying users grew 29% in the Indian Subcontinent on iOS and 28% in Indonesia on Android.

The findings point to a wider mismatch between early engagement and longer-term user value. While some app categories showed stronger Day 7 retention, that improvement did not carry through to Day 30.

In Southeast Asia, finance Day 7 retention on Android rose 45% year on year. Day 30 retention for the same vertical fell 32% over the same period.

That pattern repeated across finance, entertainment and shopping in every region and on both major platforms. Gaming's early retention was broadly steady, but its Day 30 retention still weakened in line with the other sectors.

Across all four verticals, all four regions and both platforms, Day 30 retention declined in every case measured in the report. This suggests marketers are finding it harder to turn initial app usage into longer-term engagement.

Fraud trends

The report also found that top-line improvements in fraud rates masked sharp increases in specific country and platform combinations. Overall, fraud rates declined across APAC, but not evenly.

Shopping's iOS fraud rate in Southeast Asia fell 90%, while finance iOS fraud in the same region dropped 80%. But gaming's Android fraud rate in Japan rose 68%, and entertainment's iOS fraud rate in the Indian Subcontinent climbed 170% even as regional averages improved.

This uneven picture reflects the report's broader message that aggregate regional figures can conceal important differences in how individual markets behave. For budget holders, that raises the risk of overreacting to a headline trend while missing a shift in user quality or fraud exposure.

Spending shifts

Marketing spend patterns also varied widely by sector and country. In Vietnam, entertainment user acquisition spend on Android rose 194%, more than seven times the regional pace.

India also recorded a significant rise in shopping spend. User acquisition spending in the category increased 55% on Android, which the report linked to two major eCommerce sales moving into September and concentrating seasonal demand into a single quarter.

Indonesia stood out in remarketing. Finance remarketing conversions on Android surged 268%, while paid installs in the same segment grew only 3% over the same period.

The gaming sector showed signs of rising acquisition costs in Southeast Asia. User acquisition spend on Android was broadly flat, but the paid installs generated by that spending fell 36%, indicating marketers paid roughly the same amount for more than a third fewer installs.

Ronen Mense, president and managing director, APAC at AppsFlyer, said the disconnect between user growth and monetisation is becoming harder to ignore.

"What we're seeing in the data is that installs and monetization have decoupled, and a single growth number, at the regional level, increasingly conceals as much as it reveals. These are new signals, and teams that read them correctly will make very different budget decisions from those still optimizing on install volume alone," Mense said.

He said marketers need to assess acquisition, retention, payer behaviour and fraud together rather than treat them as separate indicators.

"Marketers who assess acquisition, retention, payer behavior, and fraud together will make fundamentally different decisions from those working off a single regional number. When those signals diverge, the instinct is often to scale what looks like it is working or cut what looks like it is not, but the more important question is why they are diverging. A market losing installs but growing paying users needs a very different response from one gaining installs but losing retention. Understanding the mechanism behind the divergence will turn data into a real decision. And this isn't a mobile-only problem. As measurement expands across web, CTV, and other channels, the ability to read these signals together, not in isolation, is what separates a modern marketing organization from one still flying on a single metric," Mense said.