Adjust has released the 2025 Mobile App Growth Report, a global UA leaderboard ranking regions, countries, and verticals by growth potential using the evolved Adjust Growth Score. This score now includes installs, cost efficiency, sessions per user per day, and retention, normalized for fair comparison. Key findings: APAC leads regions with a score of 45; India tops countries with 49; gaming dominates verticals at 45.8, with hyper casual leading; publications rank second at 30.8.
The report helps UA managers navigate rising costs and fragmented user journeys.
The evolution of Adjust's Growth Score, now factoring in session depth and retention, reflects a structural shift in how UA success is measured. This is not a minor tweak but a response to the post-IDFA environment where installs alone no longer correlate with long-term value. For UA and monetization teams, the key implication is that benchmark comparisons will now penalize high-volume but low-engagement campaigns.
Markets like APAC and India score high in this new framework, suggesting that cost efficiency and user quality can coexist there. Meanwhile, Gaming's dominance, especially hyper-casual, underscores that even traditionally lean-back verticals are being graded on engagement. The practical impact for ad ops: re-baseline UA metrics and align creative strategies to drive session frequency and retention, not just installs.
Shopping app installs rose 16% YoY in 2024 but fell 18% in H1 2025, while sessions climbed, signaling a shift to higher-quality users. LATAM showed strong growth (installs +18%, sessions +27%). Marketplace apps lead engagement with 24.8% day-1 retention. Global CPI for e-commerce dropped to $0.99 in Q1 2025, with North America highest at $2.70. Key trends include quick commerce ($195B projected), voice commerce ($151.4B), AI chatbots, privacy-first personalization, and D2C mobile investment.
Seamless linking and UX are critical but often overlooked drivers of mobile growth. As user journeys become omnichannel and cross-platform, broken links cause drop-offs and lost revenue. Deep linking boosts conversions by 20–30%, and owned channels are 3–4x more cost-efficient with 2x higher retention when integrated well. Marketers must prioritize linking infrastructure to ensure every click delivers a smooth experience, ultimately increasing app adoption, retention, and LTV.
Adjust's 2026 predictions emphasize multi-platform measurement, AI-driven decision-ready insights, and linking optimization for growth. Key themes include aggregating signals for privacy-safe personalization, predictive analytics for long-term success, and evaluating paid and organic performance together. Regional highlights: Europe's gaming growth via monetization, China's AI-native entertainment, APAC's market divergence, Japan's demand for integrated measurement. Actionable takeaway: invest in unified analytics that connect mobile, web, and offline touchpoints to optimize user journeys and ROI.
Adjust Growth Copilot, an AI-powered tool, helps app marketers quickly assess campaign performance, identify data anomalies, optimize channel efficiency, discover top creatives, forecast spend, and uncover funnel trends. It converts natural language questions into actionable insights, reducing time spent on dashboards and enabling faster, data-driven decisions for smarter app growth.
Karthik Kannan distills deep linking into a practical 4R framework: Remember, Reach, Retrieve, Route. For ad ops teams, the key insight is that campaign context must survive the click-to-app journey. Adjust TrueLink captures link parameters on click; the user is then guided into the app via Universal Links, Android App Links, URI schemes, app stores, or web-to-app flows. On SDK init, the app session is matched and attributed to the click, then link data is passed to the app for routing. Decision-makers should ensure deep link paths, campaign parameters, attribution matching, and fallback journeys are tested to protect measurement and user experience.
Conversion Rules by Adjust gives ad ops teams customizable fraud prevention logic beyond fixed filters. It validates installs and events based on business-specific thresholds like app version, region, store source, device trust, and post-install behavior. Three rule types—device-level, skip source, and post-install activity—allow real-time enforcement without engineering effort. This ensures misaligned traffic is stopped before attribution, improving accuracy and budget efficiency. For ad ops decision-makers, it means more precise measurement and protection from non-fraudulent but unusable traffic.
Adjust's Growth Copilot streamlines UA manager workflows by unifying fragmented data, automating insights, and proactive recommendations. It reduces time spent on manual tasks like performance checks, creative monitoring, cohort analysis, and budget planning. Key benefits include auto-flagged creative fatigue, real-time cohort insights, and automated forecasting. The tool transforms reactive UA into proactive decision-making, allowing teams to focus on strategy. For ad ops decision-makers, this means faster, data-driven growth with less operational friction.
Japan's finance app category is outperforming, with H1 2026 installs up 8% YoY and sessions up 40%—nearly 5x the install growth and well ahead of global figures (5% and 29%). Stock trading is the standout subvertical: installs +90% YoY and average session length climbing to 11.7 minutes, driven by NISA reforms and a retail investor resurgence. Retention is improving across the full 30-day curve (D1 17% to 19%, D30 7% to 8%). For ad ops teams, the takeaway is clear: prioritize measurement depth, re-engagement, and channel-level quality over top-of-funnel volume alone.
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