John Koetsier, Author at Singular

Great new book >> Game Analytics: Retention and monetization in free-to-play mobile games

Ever wish someone had written the book on everything you need to know to make mobile app businesses run profitably? Wish no more … it has been done. I recently chatted with software engineer and computer scientist Russell Ovans about his new book: Game Analytics: Retention and monetization in free-to-play mobile games, currently available on Amazon.

It’s a great primer for anyone new to the industry, and deep enough to offer even veterans deep insights into mobile game analytics.

Click play, then keep scrolling:

Falling into game analytics

The best careers are accidental. Ovans fell into social gaming in the Farmville era of games on Facebook after a venture into making day trading software pivoted unexpectedly into building a Family Feud app that went massively viral. (Yes: not all pivots are obvious!)

But the timing was … interesting.

“Facebook was the biggest gaming platform in the world,” Ovans said. “And they didn’t want to be.”

Ovans ended up selling that company to Real Networks, the early pioneer in streaming, and went off to teach at a university, start a brewery, and find other ways to light a stack of cash on fire. But years later he had a chance to join East Side Games, makers of Star Trek, The Office, and Trailer Park Boys games, as director of analytics.

One challenge: now everything in gaming and game analytics was different. He read Eric Seufert’s Freemium Economics, learning from it, but wanted more detail about how to actually do everything. And that was the genesis of Game Analytics: Retention and monetization in free-to-play mobile games.

“My book is kind of like the 300-page addendum to Freemium Economics that says, oh, by the way, this is how you calculate and build a retention curve, which is kind of the foundational piece, right?” says Ovans. “And then from there you can look at the flip side, which is the monetization curve, and from that, the monetization curve, you can then predict ROAS from early signals and and away you go, you’re off to the races.”

The Game Analytics book itself

The book is super-comprehensive and includes code samples, SQL, visuals in Tableau, example tables of data and much more to make it a super hands-on manual to game analytics, monetization, and testing.

Typical chapters include:

Retention metrics
Monetization metrics
Dashboards
The retention curve
Predicting DAU
The monetization curve
A/B testing and analytics
Optimized pricing
Predicting ROAS from early signals
And much, much more …

All of it comes with code samples and walks you through how to actually do all the things game analytics analysts need to do. And it also comes with the deep insights that only those who have been there and done that — and thought deeply about it, and brought a significantly analytical and scientific approach to it — can deliver.

Take A/B testing, for example.

A/B testing is something that everyone tells you to do and everyone knows is a good idea, but much fewer actually know how to do properly to generate useful results that will have a positive impact.

“A lot of people just don’t know what they’re doing,” Ovans says. “There’s a real deficit in our industry about how to do it correctly and in particular, what kind of tests you can actually do in a reasonable amount of time and have enough power in the calculation. So I go into great detail about how, before you run a test, what it is exactly you’re measuring, what’s the difference that you’re looking to detect as being significant, and thus these are the number of people that need to be in your test and control group in order to be reasonably sure.”

Ovans speaks from experience.

At one point he ran A/B tests on introducing banners ads into Trailer Park Boys. The initial test said adding the ads would not impact churn and retention, so they added the ad units. Unfortunately, the roll-out was not smooth and they had to turn it off. 6 months later Ovans re-ran the tests — after learning more about statistics and A/B testing — and determined that his initial tests had not included enough players in the sample size to be significant.

The new tests concluded rather definitively that Trailer Park Boys should not add banner ads: they would impact churn. From failure came wisdom … and someone else’s expensive lessons are the cheapest way to learn.

Other learnings: pricing in-app purchases

The book isn’t just about game analytics. It’s also full of practical insights on key things like pricing.

One example: a chapter that gives an overview of iOS and Android pricing for in-app purchases. It turns out that letting Google or Apple just morph your IAP pricing for the U.S. into currency converted values for other countries is a big mistake.

The key insight here: not all markets conform to normalized exchange rates, which will affect potential revenues. Mexico became profitable for one of Ovan’s games after he learned this lesson and reduced pricing to levels that were acceptable in the region.

Rather than straight conversions, you need to take into account purchasing power: how many hours of labor are necessary to buy a particular commodity. Another factor: Value-added taxes, which in many countries are pre-built into prices, unlike the U.S. or Canada.

And yet another gotcha: while the iOS App Store will adjust your pricing over time as currency conversions change, Google Play will not. The result over time can become quite significant, and it’ll have a major impact on your in-game economy and therefore profitability.

Highly recommended

There are plenty of uses for a book like this. One is to give it to the newbies on the team to get them up to speed. Another is to discreetly check on all the stuff that your imposter syndrome tells you that you ought to already know but somehow missed. And yet another is to use it as a resource to quickly find a method or code snippet that will come in handy.

I gotta say: I recommend Ovan’s books for all those purposes.

9 new channels for mobile user acquisition I’m seeing in 2024

One of the benefits of diving into gigabytes of data representing billions of installs and trillions of impressions is that you see some unexpected things. I was recently doing that when prepping the 2024 Singular ROI Index (coming soon!), and one of those things that I found while not looking for it is 9 new channels for mobile user acquisition.

New? Well, let’s say “new.”

Some of them were new to me. Some of them will most likely be new to you too. Perhaps the best word is non-traditional.

Traditional channels for mobile user acquisition

The traditional channels for mobile user acquisition are well known. And the biggest, right now, are the best known:

Google
Meta
TikTok
Apple Search Ads

No one who runs an indie network or a smaller adtech company probably wants to hear this, but these aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they’re getting bigger and better, having (mostly) weathered the storm from ATT and SKAdNetwork. And while 1 very obviously benefited more or less directly from ATT, the others actually have as well, after some initial setbacks and panic.

It turns out, after all, that having huge amounts of first-party data is helpful when data is no longer getting shipped around the mobile ecosystem like Dom Perignon at a high-end Vegas club.

Who knew?

But what about new channels for mobile user acquisition?

9 new channels for mobile user acquisition

But there are also some new, different, and (in some cases) frankly odd channels that I’m seeing mobile app publishers try. Not all of them are at huge scale, and your ability to use any individual one of them deeply depends on the resources at your disposal, but some of them might work well for you.

1. Custom SMS

Remember about 10-15 years ago when SMS marketing was kind of a thing? Something that was a category, with startups popping up with SMS marketing management systems.

Turns out that while mobile ads took all the hype, SMS marketing never went anywhere. In fact, Captera has a ridiculous 650 products in its SMS Marketing Software category. And it turns out that a phone number is a pretty bloody good unique identifier for cross platform identity verification and marketing measurement.

It’s also something that most of us see: we notice text messages. Even respond to them sometimes.

Now while they’re clearly not really a marketing channel like mobile advertising, there are use cases here:

Capture leads with cheap web ads, follow up on SMS
Partner with a complementary company that has a lot of phone numbers to sponsor a message
Terrestrial radio marketing call to action: “message XYZ to 123 to get a free ABC”
Out of home campaigns with similar calls to action

Pair any of these, or insert-your-unique-idea-here with a deep link, and you’re in business.

2. Mobile web

OK. Not new. I get it.

But, many aren’t using it. Most app marketers are doing in-app app ads, and not much else. What I saw in the data is that the use of mobile web campaigns to kick off a customer/player/user journey is increasing.

Nuff said.

3. CTV (connected TV)

Ditto to above: not super-new. But also ditto to #2: most aren’t using it.

I’ll save the actual percentage for the launch of the ROI Index, but what I can tell you now is that we’re seeing double-digit year-over-year increases in mobile app advertising on streaming CTV channels. VOD (video on demand) is becoming AVOD (ad-supported video on demand) as all the SVOD (streaming video on demand) channels are turning to ad-supported tiers of service in hopes of expanding their addressable market.

All that alphabet soup acronym list means is more ad inventory for mobile app marketers.

Learn more about it here: Planting trees versus picking fruit: CTV and user acquisition.

4. Email

Email? Yes, email. The grandaddy OG of digital marketing channels is now a growth channel for marketers seeking new channels for mobile user acquisition.

Whoda thunk it?

(Not me.)

Shockingly, email marketing still works. Shockingly, decades after the reputed death of email, people are still sending commercial messages via one of the oldest internet protocols and generating results. Granted, this is probably often used in conjunction with other methods (you may have to get the email list in the first place, or get an email address in a marketing context somehow).

But you can also do deals with companies that have big healthy email lists and are looking for sponsors who get to add paid links.

5. Newsletter

Newsletter? Yes, newsletter. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Email is old. Newsletters are also old, but they (perhaps like email) are seeing a resurgence thanks to Substack and other free or paid newsletter platforms.

Find a complementary one. Sponsor it.

Or start your own, with relevant info that your target player/user/customer would want, and invest over time in building your own owned marketing resources. Everyone starts from zero, which sucks, but with time and investment, it can grow.

6. Referral

Word of mouth goes mobile? Yup.

One of the niche but growing new mobile user acquisition channels I saw in the data was referrals. It’s not high-volume, but (and this is an educated guess) it’s likely to be higher value and more likely to convert, given it’s based on a personal recommendation from a friend or family member.

First prerequisite: an amazing app experience.

Second prerequisite: a better-together amazing app experience that makes existing users/customers/players want to invite people.

Third prerequisite: a great onboarding experience tied to the person who referred the app in the first place.

(Again, perhaps not new to you. But perhaps worth revisiting.)

7. No-store direct install

Obviously it’s Android-only at the moment. Perhaps after some new litigation and legislation it’ll also be possible on iOS in the European Union. But no-store direct installs are an interesting new user acquisition channel that I’m seeing grow.

One partner who does it: SingleTap by Digital Turbine, and Digital Turbine says there’s less friction (sure, I buy that) and better engagement. It’s certainly an easy way to cross-promote your apps, and worth a look for bigger app publishers.

It might even be an interesting monetization strategy for already big apps.

8. Lockscreen ads

If you’re in an Android-heavy geo, you’re probably already doing this. If you’re in an iOS stronghold, you might wonder what the heck this is.

But experiences on the lockscreen by partners like Glance by InMobi are interesting ways that I’m seeing mobile app marketers use to grow.

9. Affiliate marketing and affiliate networks

It’s possible this is limited to high-value apps like fintechs, but there’s a clear upswing in marketers using affiliate marketing mechanics as a new mobile user acquisition channel.

The rub is you have to be able to afford a bounty is attractive to affiliate networks, but since there are markets in everything and arbitrage opportunities all over the adtech ecosystem, this might be less of a barrier than I’m thinking.

One thing I’d want to watch out for: brand risk if affiliate marketers go hog-wild in ways that negatively impact your app or company.

More new channels for mobile user acquisition?

Seeing (or using) other new channels for mobile user acquisition?

Ping us and share.

I’d love to interview you on Growth Masterminds about pockets of opportunity for growth that you’re seeing.

Maximize ad monetization revenue: RTB vs manual (or, how to get sly with AdOps)

How do you maximize ad monetization revenue in your app? Should you let the RTB engines do their automated thing, or should you manually adjust how they operate?

In a word … yes.

Click play, then keep scrolling down …

The love of money might be the root of all evil, but money itself is pretty bloody good, actually. Especially if you’re a growth marketer. The reason why is simple: the more revenue you make from running your app or game, the more you can invest in growth. The higher CAC you can afford, the more likely you are to be able to acquire high-quality new users or players.

So as much as growth marketers need to be amazing at their jobs, product, live ops, and engagement managers need to be amazing too.

Maximize ad monetization revenue

What can you do to maximize ad monetization revenue? I recently chatted with Farhan Haq about exactly this question. Except he called it getting sly with AdOps in an RTB world. Haq is an industry veteran who’s had UA and monetization roles with Nanobit, Dapper, Social Point, SYBO, and Carry1st, and now runs his own independent growth agency called Hyper HQ.

So how do you get sly with AdOps in an RTB world?

You maximize ad monetization revenue by letting the RTB engines do what they do best, AND by manually adjusting how they operate. (AI, after all, is pretty good, but it’s often someone else’s AI, which means it might not have your supreme best interests in mind.)

Most marketers are very reliant on real-time bidding, Haq says. But it’s important to understand how it works and what it does if you want to maximize ad monetization revenue.

“The way to get your higher CPMs … what you need to do is a lot of manual calls and run them up against your overall real time bidding and constantly refresh those,” he says.

Hands-on customization

For some networks that’s impossible: app monetizers, meet black box. You get what you get, and you can choose to be OK with it or not.

For others, it is possible, such as Unity’s LevelPlay AKA ironSource, or AppLovin MAX, or even AdMob or Google Ad Manager. For AppLovin in particular, customization is a main selling point, with a brand promise of being able to “control every aspect of your monetization strategy.”

For networks that allow it, Haq recommends running “constant A/B tests.” If you don’t, the risk is that you won’t achieve high enough CPMs to build a scalable UA engine. RTB alone will achieve only mediocre results, Haq says.

One thing to look for: big gaps in calls at significantly different CPMs, which could indicate a missed opportunity. Other things to be A/B testing for besides pricing include different placements, ad units, and geo tests to maximize value for rewarded videos, interstitials, banners, or whatever you have.

And yes, banners are still relevant.

“If you don’t hurt your user experience, you will get a lot of revenue from even banners because just the amount of time, the amount of views you can get, you can get per user, per day,” Haq says. “You can show 30 to 40 banners a day and they’re still relevant, so really optimizing all of those is important.”

Why can’t you just keep it all automated?

The answer is simple if you just ask yourself a question: who is all of this ad infrastructure actually automated in favor of? Most mediation engines are going to function in ways that benefit their makers. That’s to be expected and normal, but a little manual tweak can swing the dial somewhat back towards you: the app publisher/marketer/monetizer.

Google Ad Manager … boost ARPDAU 15-20%?

You can still do manual calls on Google and it’s important to do that with AdMob, Haq says.

But something many marketers forget about is Google Ad Manager, which is a way to buy Google inventory outside of Google. That’s a thing Google intended to kill but has not yet done so, and the potential benefits for you are huge.

“You’re missing out if you just use what you think are the traditional networks and not really understanding that there are other networks out there,” Haq says. “ I’ve seen many companies out there after they’ve added those Google Ad Manager networks that have increased their ARPDAU by like 15 to 20% at least.

That’s huge.

Of course, it may disappear at any time, so if you’re able to jump on it and reap the rewards right now, go for it.

Scaling user acquisition via better monetization

UA is better when monetization is better. I asked Haq what he’s able to achieve with an average client in terms of revenue boost.

“What I would say is that you will be able to improve if your ads ARPDAU and if you improve your ad ARPDAU without hurting your retention, which I believe fundamentally you can do, you will be able to essentially improve your LTV,” he said. “And you don’t need to double, treble, quadruple your lifetime value in order to be able to scale your UA.”

The example:

At $1.50 per user in the U.S. maybe you can get 1,000/day
At $2, you can get 5,000 to 10,000

If you can do that profitably … your game or app has a chance to completely skyrocket up the charts and become a major player. In other words, to grow explosively, you need to maximize ad monetization.

One more thing: an idea to try

Why are you giving every user the same reward for a rewarded ad view, or an engagement with a playable ad? Some users are worth more than others.

Haq’s idea: get smarter, segment users, and provide higher rewards in virtual goods (gems, gold, etc.) to higher-value users.

As a game player myself, this is genius. I’ll sometimes refuse to engage in ad experience in a game I love, simply because sometimes I know (or suspect) that the rewards aren’t worth my time. And this is a game I’ve spent hundreds of dollars in, so I’m a pretty valuable paying player for this game.

Try it!

Yeah, much more in the full podcast on how to maximize ad monetization

Have you subscribed to Growth Masterminds yet? Check out the full podcast on all the usual platforms, or watch it on YouTube channel.

Our goal: you’ll get smarter thanks to good ideas from other marketers and industry insiders. In this case, you just might get better at knowing how to maximize ad monetization.

Everything in this show:

00:00 Introduction and Guest Presentation
01:05 Understanding Ad Operations in an RTB World
01:57 The Importance of Manual Calls and Realtime Bidding
03:46 Optimizing Networks and Running AB Tests
04:05 The Role of Competition in Ad Monetization
04:27 Understanding the Fundamentals of AB Testing
05:53 The Impact of Ad Placement and Pricing on Monetization
06:02 The Importance of Ad Units in Monetization
07:27 The Impact of Automation on Ad Monetization
07:27 The Importance of Hands-On Approach in Ad Monetization
08:48 The Role of Google Ad Manager in Monetization
10:17 The Role of User Acquisition in Monetization
20:23 The Impact of Geographical Location on Monetization
26:59 The Future of Ad Monetization
32:13 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

D2C for mobile games: how to save on app store fees WITHIN the rules

Is it possible to make D2C for mobile games work? Safely and legally?

Google Play and the iOS App Store are marvelous things. They enable something we’d struggle to believe possible just a few short years ago: instant global distribution for free. And if your app is ad-supported a complimentary service, or a retail app, it can remain that way: free.

Of course, there are fees for in-app purchases: 30% or less depending on a variety of factors. And that’s even true with the new-found freedom on iOS to use a third-party app store or third-party payment service in Europe, thanks to the Digital Markets Act.

This means 30% of your gross revenue is gone before you even see it. And that has an impact on your profitability as well as your ability to build and ship new functionality.

But for some, there might be another option.

Perhaps a direct to consumer model would still work for you. Legally. Safely. And within Apple’s and Google’s stated guidelines and rules. Recently I chatted with Stash.gg’s head of product, Archie Stonehill, about precisely how that can be done.

D2C for mobile games

Games have often been heavily intermediated by stores, whether a PC platform like Steam or a console platform like Playstation or Xbox. Mobile’s no different, with Google Play or the App Store sitting between you and your end user, player, or customer.

Right now on mobile, of course, that’s a hot topic: should game publishers be able to sideload games or install them directly from a website, and use whatever payment processing platform they wish?

Stash can’t help with sideloading or installing from websites, but they do think they can help in terms of direct sales and retaining more of your gross revenue. Co-founded by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, former Zynga executive Robin Chan, and Googler Dan Borstelmann, Stash’s mission is to enable developers to become their own platforms.

“We’re trying to be the anti-platform, the direct-to-consumer platform for developers,” says Stonehill.

That’s D2C, and it’s not just about financial transactions. Stash also aims to provide identity services and the expertise to manage consumer experiences effectively. In other words: sort of a customer experience platform for mobile apps and games. Because a big piece of D2C for mobile games is about knowing your customer as something more than an avatar in a game.

Making it kosher and safe

Google and Apple are pretty clear: if you have a mobile-only game, purchases need to happen in-app. But they’ve also acknowledged that there are cross-platform experiences in which people can play the mobile app or a desktop or console version.

The key, then, is to become cross-platform.

And to ensure that at least 1 of the platforms you publish on is fully under your control.

“You are allowed to sell things outside of your store through other channels,” says Stonehill. “Particularly if you’re what’s called a multi-platform service — read a cross-platform game — you have a lot more discretion, which is why a lot of the successes here, like Raid, like some of the Scopely games, have been cross-platform.”

That’s easier said than done for some types of apps or games, of course. It’s one of the reasons why casino games are distributed on browser as well as mobile app … and it’s probably a lot easier to do that with a casino game than a midcore or hardcore mobile game.

But creating a cross-platform experience for your app or game is the key. And then in the EU and now in the U.S., thanks to the recent Epic anti-steering ruling, in your app you can tell your players or users about their purchase options elsewhere.

Of course, external payments have already been happening for years, with Stonehill suggesting that some major game publishers take as much as 30% of their revenue off-store to their own web-based e-commerce experiences. But that can be unsafe: you still need the app stores for distribution, and so following the rules is important.

Where D2C for mobile games needs to win: experience

It’s hard to beat 1-click purchasing via Amazon. It’s just as hard to beat in-app purchase processes that Google and Apple have built.

They’re simple, they’re instant … they’re painless.

So what do you do?

“You have to focus on experience, not convenience,” Stonehill says. “The reason that is so important is you will never build a more convenient distribution channel than Apple or a more convenient payment product than Apple. So you won’t win on convenience.”

That means building a cross-platform experience that is good enough that it is worth players, users, or customers making a special effort to put their app down, open up a web browser, sign in, and engage with whatever it is that you’ve made available there. In addition, you have to make it good enough that even though payments will be harder — especially initially when people have to input a credit card for the first time — they will push through the obstacles.

Not an option for everyone

Of course, D2C for mobile games (or apps) is not an option for everyone. Even though Stash will help, not everyone can build a cross-platform experience that matches Apple’s or Google’s definitions.

If you’re a tiny hyper-casual game, for instance, it’s probably out of your reach.

But if you’re a large publisher and see the 30% you’re giving up as a significant chunk of missing growth, it might be an opportunity. At least until additional legislation passes in the EU and/or the U.S. about what precisely is allowed and what is not.

Because it’s actually more than 30%.

“It’s almost always more than you think because it’s 30% of gross revenue, not net revenue,” Stonehill says. “So what the developers typically think of as revenue is that 70% amount. The ratio isn’t 10 to 3, it’s 7 to 4. So in fact, the amount of money that’s going to Apple and Google is about 40-45% of what you are making as a developer.”

But … and it’s an important but … stay safe. Stay within the Google Play and App Store guidelines.

Much more in the full podcast

Check out the full podcast on all the usual platforms, or watch it on YouTube.

00:00 Introduction to the Gaming Industry’s Challenges
00:43 The Role of Third-Party App Stores
01:29 The Impact of the Digital Markets Act
02:23 The Three Vectors of Pro-Competitive Pushes
04:23 The Importance of Direct Relationships with Players
05:11 The Evolution of the Games Industry
12:36 The Role of Stash in the Gaming Industry
32:26 The Future of the Gaming Industry
36:36 Conclusion

AllTrails CEO Ron Schneidermann on becoming Apple’s 2023 iPhone app of the year

I’d never gotten this answer before.

In all the years I’ve been talking to growth marketers and CEOs about growing mobile apps, I’ve never heard what AllTrails CEO Ron Schneidermann told me. In a long chat for Growth Masterminds about AllTrails becoming Apple’s most recent iPhone app of the year, I asked him about the key factors in his app’s growth. His answer was literally unique in my experience.

“Process design.”

I’ve heard ad network hacks. Smart traffic arbitrage opportunities. Features. Celeb shoutouts, random Tiktok virality, relentless creative optimization. But I’ve never heard “process design” before as a growth hack or vector for doubling performance.

But as I listened, it started to all make sense.

“Honestly, one of the biggest levers for growth is process design,” Schneidermann says. “As lame and boring as that sounds, you can hire the best people in the world, you add all this mass, but if you don’t create the system for velocity around them, you lose your momentum.”

It’s a unique answer for a unique app.

In the fast-paced world of mobile apps, few can claim the level of success and recognition that AllTrails has achieved. Named the iPhone app of the year in 2023 out of all the millions of the apps on the App Store, AllTrails has become a go-to platform for outdoor enthusiasts and adventurers. With likely 10s of millions of users, a massively successful subscription plan, and 7X better user retention than the average app, AllTrails is a bit of a unicorn.

But how?

On being named iPhone app of the year

Many accolades in our professional lives are not worth the plastic in their plaques. We all know the game: events and organizations dream up awards because they’ll drum up interest. When you have an award, you need to have winners, so a LinkedIn search happens, a few questions get asked, and BOOM … winners are found.

In some cases, you can simply buy the award from an organization that exists simply to sell awards. (Yeah, check your LinkedIn inbox.)

$500 later you too can humblebrag to your bestest friends on LinkedIn that you’re SHOCKED, so HUMBLED, just absolutely SPEECHLESS because the universe has decided to pick you (yes, you!) out of the teeming masses and recognize your innate genius, dedication, hard work, and spare cash. Finally, someone besides your mom sees you for who you really are.

That’s not like iPhone app of the year.

Even after Apple’s late 2022 app-aggedon cleared out old and out of date apps, there are close to 5 million apps on the App Store in 2024, according to Statista. Everything Apple does is data driven, AppFigures CEO Ariel Michaeli recently told me on a livestream, and you know it’s true especially for something as high profile as this.

So it’s meaningful.

“It feels like our Pulitzer Prize, our Academy Award, our Super Bowl, all rolled up, and to be able to share that with the team … as I’m sure most of your listeners know, software development is a grind,” Schneidermann says. “So much of it is not very glamorous and oftentimes it just feels like this uphill grind. And so to be able to share it with every single person involved in the company — every single employee outside of just product development and engineering, customer support, marketing, data integrity, like every single function had had a part in getting this — that’s a really wonderful thing to be able to celebrate together and share it with our board, share it with our investors.”

Living the brand

Schneidermann should know what a grind is. He’s an avid hiker and outdoor enthusiast who is raising his kids on trails. For hikers, a grind is a particularly hard and grueling stretch of trail that is generally mostly uphill. As anyone who’s built software or a startup, it’s a good analogy for the work and dedicated commitment over time required.

But it was never supposed to be like that.

Instead, it was supposed to be a quick flip.

“I took over from the founder in 2015 when it was a six person company,” Schneidermann told me. “The handshake agreement was to try and grow it a little bit and sell it: that was what I signed up for.”

The goal was to sell for $30-40 million, but 9 years later, he’s still at AllTrails, having refused an offer from a big tech company. And his definition of success has changed so much he really can’t see himself anywhere else.

“I love the outdoors: it’s a core part of my life,” he says. “I have three kids. I’m raising them on the trail, and so to be able to spend my time and energy on something that means so much to me personally and to my family personally, that that’s a very unique opportunity.”

Organic growth FTW

AllTrails’ success story begins with organic growth.

With a deep understanding of their target audience — mostly the team and the intended customer were a pretty good match already — and a commitment to providing value, AllTrails built a product that resonated with outdoor enthusiasts.

A big driver: the subscription business, which was not nearly as sexy in 2015 as it later became.

Another huge driver: a rich legacy on the web that provided excellent SEO for premium — and cheap — discoverability that led to a metric ton of app installs. (The fact that it’s a multi-platform service that you can subscribe to online and therefore avoid platform fees on IAPs is another plus, of course.) Adding strong ASO to strong SEO, AllTrails capitalized on organic traffic to fuel their early growth.

All of that is driven, of course, by a massive community engine.

Most startups talk community and want community — or the potential positive benefits of it. Few achieve critical mass of an active, growing group of users that get as much or more value as they contribute. At AllTrails, the community contributes huge amounts of value: trail info, mapping tips, photos, scores and difficulty grades, among other things.

One of the more surprising things I noticed about AllTrails: they update their app on average every 11 days. That seems high to me, and I asked Schneidermann if it was relevant to the company’s growth story.

“Absolutely,” he says. “That’s very intentional and the reason why is that aside from our employees, our single biggest asset is our community, right? AllTrails is nothing without our community.”

“Why do communities ebb and flow? Why do once vibrant communities suddenly disappear? Sometimes it keeps me up at night … I think one of the key things, because it is a symbiotic relationship: our community members, our users are taking time to invest in content within our platform. They’re leaving reviews for other trail goers. They’re adding photos, they’re emailing us with new trails that we should have on our platform. They’re emailing us with product feedback and ideas. It’s a very vibrant and active community, and so in return, our obligation to them is to demonstrate our investment as well.”

There you go:

How often you update your app can be an important part of your organic growth strategy … if it’s aligned with a strategy to provide incredible values for users, customers, or players.

Plus paid acquisition …

Of course, there’s also paid acquisition.

As AllTrails scaled, they recognized the need to diversify user acquisition channels. While organic growth continues to be a significant driver, AllTrails uses paid user acquisition to reach new users that might not have stumbled across them on the web or in an app store.

Other tactics include strategic partnerships and investments in channels such as podcasts and CTV.

One key: just like the ever-evolving nature of organic acquisition, paid channels are always evolving, requiring AllTrails to stay agile and adapt to changes in algorithms, costs, and privacy regulations.

All of which, of course, will sound very familiar to any other growth marketers.

Big question: still willing to fail after being app of the year?

One of the luxuries of being tiny is that you can fail in the dark.

No-one notices, and so it’s easier to aim high, take risks, and generally do things that big corporations and successful companies don’t want to do because … they’re successful, and that becomes part of their core identity, and therefore failing would be a horrendous, awful, inconceivable thing.

Like most, though, AllTrails’ growth journey has not been without its share of failures and learning opportunities. Schneidermann says they’ll continue to embrace failure as a means of growth, fostering a culture that acknowledges mistakes, learns from them, and uses them to drive improvement.

Even when you bring on new people that might not initially have the same mindset.

“This is where core values and like cultural tenets and, and everything else like really come into play,” Schneidermann says. “One of the fascinating things is that we had 30 people at the start of the pandemic. We doubled head count, doubled head count, and doubled head count year over year over year. And we were bringing people from all sorts of different companies, and what we found was like there are certain, bigger companies specifically where folks were just trained to be more risk averse.”

“And so we had to get in front of that and just be really proactive about what it means to work here. And, at AllTrails, it’s all about momentum. It’s all about momentum. We can’t let perfect get in the way of good. We’re gonna embrace our failures. Sometimes you have to move forward when there isn’t statistical significance or clear cut research. We kind of have to trust our intuition or our gut sometimes. The key thing again is momentum.”

So much more in our full conversation …

There’s much more in the full podcast.

Subscribe to Growth Masterminds on your favorite podcasting platform and subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we’ll post the video versions. What we talk about …

00:00 Introduction to the Journey of Success

00:25 The Making of an iPhone App of the Year

01:45 Understanding the Significance of Being iPhone App of the Year

04:10 The All Trails App: A Closer Look

05:18 The Journey from Startup to Success

07:24 The Decision to Reject Quick Flip and Aim for Long-Term Growth

07:44 Key Decisions that Ignited Growth

12:14 The Role of Product Development in Growth

25:33 The Importance of Regular App Updates

27:50 Advice for Aspiring App Developers

28:15 Conclusion: The Importance of Humility and Openness

Apple’s new Core Technology Fee could cost free apps $400,000 a month (or you can just stick with the old App Store rules)

Think back to 2013. An unknown developer in Vietnam built a truly simple game with a silly name that exploded to 90 million downloads on mobile app stores. It was, of course, Flappy Bird, and its creator Dong Nguyen was soon making $50,000 a day in ad revenue.

Now imagine doing the same thing in the EU in 2024. Some teen makes a cool app with a no-code tool, gets excited about distributing it freely outside the App Store, and makes that the ill-fated choice. If lightning strikes and virality happens, an equivalent $1.5 million in monthly ad revenue would not go far thanks to the new Apple Core Technology Fee. At 90 million installs, the CTF would be $4 million or €3,708,333 each month: 50 euro cents per install over 1 million. Freedom, meet rookie mistake.

That’s an extreme edge case, of course.

But a moderately viral game with a more modest 10 million downloads in year 1 would incur monthly platform fees of $407,609 a month: not as astronomical but clearly and obviously unsustainable for any ad-supported app. And a somewhat successful hypercasual game with 3 million installs in the EU would pay $90,580 per month to Apple thanks to the Core Technology Fee.

Ouch.

Apple’s Core Technology Fee is part of its plan to comply with the EU Digital Markets Act

Now we have Apple’s plan.

Developers can either stay on the official App Store and keep their existing terms, or adopt the new terms if they choose to use the DMA-required option of a third-party app store or third-party payment processing.

Those terms are:

10% commission to 17% commission on in-app purchases (down from the 30% standard and 15% small business rate)
3% payment processing fee if they use Apple as a payment processor
€0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold: the new Core Technology Fee (CTF)

Most apps will pay less under this plan, Apple says. In fact, 99% of them will:

The reason for that is obvious: most apps fail. Or, at least fail to become large, profitable successes.

I’ve published an app, but you don’t see me retiring to the Bahamas or pontificating about it on panels. That’s simply because — like most apps — it failed to get big. Apps that don’t cross the 1 million install mark will never pay a Core Technology Fee.

Other details for third-party app stores, payment processors

In addition to the financial terms, third party app stores will require authorization from Apple: a process about which we don’t have too many details yet. And Apple will demand that apps that choose to be distributed by third-party app stores will still undergo a “baseline review” in a “notarization” process that involves both automated checks and human review, presumably to screen for fraudulent and/or scammy apps.

That notarization process will result in “app installation sheets,” similar in some sense to information on the App Stores’ app listing pages, and presumably something like the app nutrition labels Apple has required for apps on the App Store that detail privacy implications of installing and using the app.

Apple will also implement unspecified “additional malware protections” that will “prevent iOS apps from launching if they’re found to contain malware after being installed to a user’s device.”

Apps installed from third-party marketplaces or using third-party payments will incur some differences in standard user experience, too:

Product page labels: warning users they’re downloading an app with non-Apple payments
In-app warnings: telling users they are not transacting with Apple when buying something
New app review processes

Upshot: heads I win, tails you lose

The upshot is obvious: no-one who cares about scale and profitability will use these new terms of service, and therefore won’t use alternative payments or third-party app stores. That means the vast majority of apps and games that are focused on growth are better off with the existing App Store arrangements, where the Core Technology Fee will never be an issue.

Going outside the App Store under these terms is insane:

It will be harder
There will be more work
There will be less (maybe no) profit
The user experience will be worse
Users will be turned off by various warnings and labels

Some apps may, however, benefit. These would be apps that never intend to go over 1 million installs: perhaps internal apps for a business or organization. It’s possible that avoiding the typical App Store — and Apple’s enterprise program for developers that allows businesses to manage app deployment to thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees — might offer some capabilities that are worth the effort.

But I think it’s unlikely.

Most likely: this will get challenged in court

Presenting an option that isn’t really a choice might not be seen as good-faith compliance by EU regulators. We already know that Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney plans to challenge Apple’s American external payments provider plans in court.

I’d be shocked if something similar didn’t happen in Europe.

Until then … stick with the devil you know.

AI for UA: chatting with AppSamurai’s Faheem Saiyad

Where can AI help in mobile user acquisition? I recently chatted with Faheem Saiyad, a director at mobile advertising platform AppSamurai, about AI for UA.

The big question: where can AI for UA help marketers the most? Hit play to start the conversation, and keep scrolling …

First: building your app

Most UA managers won’t be helping to also build their apps and games unless you’re part of a very small team. But if you are an indie developer and that’s your current reality, AI can help.

“Back in the day designing a game was quite a complicated task,” Saiyad says. “With AI in place, what it has done has taken a lot of workload off. So, let’s say you are an indie game developer, back in the day, probably you might need a couple of freelancing outsourced people that will help you build a certain game out. But now with these resources from AI you can actually build out a certain project, do a quick soft launch, use A/B testing, even the creatives can be designed by an AI.”

I can certainly see building some of your creatives with generative AI tools like Creative Diffusion or MidJourney. And GPT-4 isn’t bad at coming up with new ideas for games that you can probably modify or riff on to improve.

AI for UA: data analysis and campaign optimization

You don’t have to be part of a small team to want extra help with data analysis and campaign optimization. BI analysts are always busy, and manually messing with CSV files, Excel spreadsheets, or Google Sheets is annoying and time-consuming.

Good news: AI is pretty good at data analysis.

“With AI what we have seen is a lot of well-run analysis that you can basically summarize, especially when you are at a soft launch stage,” says Saiyad. “So this basically helps you save a lot of time and money.”

One note: double-check a few of the calculations that your AI tool is making for you.

I have literally caught GPT-4 making some silly assumptions and mistakes. You can save a lot of time, but if you uncritically accept what a generative AI system has invented, you can also end up with some egg on your face.

Of course, sometimes the error is yours: you just didn’t prompt the generative system appropriately. Kinda like that one time I wanted a CSV file but accidentally asked for a CSS file …

There are also AI-driven tools that will find, name, and segment audiences. In some cases they’ll identify actions you can take or offers you can make to maximize conversions and spend; in other cases they’ll even take that action for you.

AI for UA: campaign creation and launching

Using AI for UA in ideation and creative development is one thing. And using AI for UA purposes in data analysis for campaign optimization is another. But using AI to actually design and launch ad campaigns autonomously within certain parameters is pushing the bar significantly higher.

“In a realm where you have an advertiser that looks to automate a certain campaign creation process, our APIs are able to plug into their backend platforms,” Saiyad says. “The idea here is that they can automatically launch campaigns, they can set bids … the optimization — although it’s not perfect — we are still getting real close.”

Right now, that’s probably a bit like Tesla’s Full Self Driving: totally fine for some who trust it and use it and swear by it, while interesting but dangerous for others who see the potential but are wary of trusting their lives to it.

Which Saiyad totally understands, adding that AI for marketing is not quite set and forget it at this point: you generally want a human in the loop.

One thing we know for sure, however, is that while AI is demonstrably imperfect, it’s also improving at breakneck speeds. So betting against automated campaigns is probably not wise, at least in the long term. (And let’s be honest: is it really that different from giving Meta or Google a stack of cash and having their algorithms figure it out?)

Not for fraud detection just yet

While AI for UA managers kinda looks perfect for fraud detection, since it should be exactly what you need to munch through mounds of data, find patterns, and either identify those correlated with poor down-funnel performance or those which are associated with shady or duplicitous means of taking credit for good ROAS … that’s not the case.

It’s not quite there yet, Saiyad says.

“We still do have manual human resources that actually keep a check on AI, especially in terms of ad fraud,” Saiyad says. “A lot of ad fraud has been going on, and as of yet, at least in my experience, I haven’t seen AI being used in the realm of preventing ad fraud at scale.”

AI for UA: much more in the full episode

If you haven’t subscribed to Growth Masterminds, now is a good time. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on your favorite podcasting platform.

In the full episode, we talk about:

00:00 Introduction and welcome
01:19 The role of AI in game development
03:35 The Impact of AI on user acquisition
06:22 Challenges of campaign optimization
10:25 Introducing rewarded playtime: a new ad unit
13:44 The future of AI in marketing and game development
16:38 Wrapping up the discussion

And, as usual, if Singular can help with anything, connect with us today.

Live: Singular’s integration with Protected Audiences in Privacy Sandbox for Android

Singular’s integration with Protected Audiences in Privacy Sandbox for Android is now live in beta and will be entering real-world testing with multiple partners over the next months. Internal end-to-end testing is complete and operational, and we’re actively working with partners to standardize workflows and data transmission to make everything just work for marketers and ad networks.

The goal, just as we had with SKAdNetwork on the iOS side over the past few years, is that Singular customers will be up and running with as little disruption as possible when Privacy Sandbox becomes fully implemented and GAIDs are scarce or nonexistent.

Refresher: what is Protected Audiences again?

Remember FLEDGE? That’s what Protected Audiences was originally called. While you can get the full rundown on what Protected Audiences is and how it works here, it’s essentially a privacy-safe on-device way of creating groups of people that advertisers can target ads to.

One thing Google said way back in 2022 was that “adtech platforms will need to prepare to have some parts of their current auction and ad selection logic deployed and executed on the device.”

With GAID being freely available, marketers today can assemble device IDs of their best users, ship them off to ad networks or platforms, and ask for more like that. From the massive device graphs that pretty much every ad network has built, partners can assemble lists of lookalike devices and dynamically target ads to them as they pop up in RTB/programmatic/exchange ad auctions, or outsource that responsibility to an exchange or SSP.

Alternatively, the big platforms like Meta and Google can find users on their platforms that look and act similar to that collection of GAIDs.

Under Privacy Sandbox, however, audience information will be stored on-device. That means the Privacy Sandbox code running privately on individual devices will essentially take notes about what people do in various apps (Topics API) and use that data for targeting.

Protected Audiences works in a similar on-device way, but it is for remarketing/retargeting and custom audience use cases. Ad networks will be able to present ads to the Privacy Sandbox code running on-device, indicating what kinds of people or users they’re appropriate for, and Privacy Sandbox will match users to ads based on what audiences a user is part of.

As Google says:

“The Protected Audience API on Android (formerly known as FLEDGE) includes the Custom Audience API and the Ad Selection API. Ad tech platforms and advertisers can use these APIs to serve customized ads based on previous app engagement that limits the sharing of identifiers across apps and limits sharing a user’s app interaction information with third-parties.”

Singular’s implementation lets ad networks do what they do best

On August 16 of last year, Google released the Custom Audiences Delegation, which supports the creation of custom audiences for ad networks or marketers that do not have an SDK present on a device.

Since then, Singular has been fully integrated with the released endpoints.

What this allows Singular to do is to create custom audiences on behalf of buyers using the new ‘fetchAndJoinCustomAudience’ endpoint, which has multiple checks and failsafes that will log issues and attempt to prevent fraudulent activity.

Singular’s implementation is designed to let MMPs do what they do best and let ad networks do what they do best:

Ad networks create and manage audiences
MMPs handle app events and adding/removing users from audiences
Ad networks handle the ads and bidding processes, as they always have

As mentioned above, however, this primarily happens on-device so that users’ exact identity and activity is protected. Singular won’t have access to the on-device data showing which audiences a user is part of, and neither will an ad network.

Singular’s implementation also lets advertisers do what they do best

Protected Audiences is built right into Singular’s existing Audiences product. That means marketers will be able to segment their users just as they always have and distribute them to ad partners just as they always have.

Of course, the technology will work quite differently on the backend, as will the data transmission (or lack thereof for privacy reasons). But ideally the effect will be the same. The goal: integrate the new Protected Audiences API with our existing product in a way that makes everything seamless for our customers.

In other words, the nice big easy button that Singular CTO promised in a recent Privacy Sandbox webinar with partners including Google, Gameloft, and Tinuiti.

So you want to test Protected Audiences …

If you saw what happened in the first six months of SKAdNetwork, you probably don’t want to see that again. Getting ahead of the curve and testing Privacy Sandbox for Android now while you also have the GAID to grade your own work is a good idea. We’re running tests for both customers who are on the Singular SDK and customers who prefer server-to-serve (S2S) integrations.

If you’d like to be part of the ongoing testing, talk to your Singular account executive about getting on the list.

Ad networks in particular: Privacy Sandbox means significant changes for you. We encourage you to reach out and chat with us about getting ready for the eventual switchover.

External iOS payments for in-app purchases now live: 3 big problems

External iOS payments for in-app goods are now available in the U.S., thanks to the 2021 Epic Games lawsuit against Apple. But don’t expect big savings. In fact, expect everything to cost more, while conversion rates go down, and users/players/customers get frustrated.

In September of 2021, Epic won a part of its lawsuit against Apple when U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Apple must allow developers to provide third-party payment options in apps. Until yesterday, that judgment was tied up in further legal wranglings. But as of today, Apple has complied with the court’s ruling and is opening up iOS for external payment providers.

Sounds good for developers, right?

Wrong.

Why? Three reasons:

The massive drop-off in conversions you’ll see
The massive amount of extra work you’ll have to do
The massive commission Apple will still charge you to go through all the hassle and pain of setting up your own app payments system

External iOS payments: almost guaranteed lower conversions

Look at the screen you’ll have to show users/players/customers before they leave to send you money on your own website or payment provider:

If you thought the ATT wording was scary and fear-mongering, here’s its best friend. “You’re about to go to an external website,” the massive bold text blares. “Apple is not responsible for the privacy or security of purchases made on the web.”

Every time you want to allow someone to make a purchase, your app must call the StoreKit External Purchase Link API. Then it will surface a system disclosure sheet like the one above, which tells your user that their App Store payment method won’t be available, refund requests won’t be handled by Apple, and Apple can’t verify any pricing or promos.

And that’s just the beginning.

Once someone clicks through that (and notice neither of the 2 options — Continue or Cancel — are prioritized or highlighted as the default) then they have to go through the hassle of setting up a credit card and account with you and/or your payment provider.

Conversion rate optimization experts know: every extra hoop you ask a customer to jump through drops your conversion rate. Setting up an account, providing personal information like an address and credit card number … all of this takes time, is tedious, and is easy to mess up on a mobile device. Worse, if you’re not a major known brand like Rovio or Uber or Lyft or LinkedIn, people are likely to be wary of trusting you and your level of security with all their data.

It’s not hard to imagine conversion rates dropping so much you lose more than the 30% you’re paying Apple for in-app purchases now: a 3-second process that most iOS users do without any problem.

External iOS payments: so much extra work

Does paying 30% or less of your revenue to Apple or Google kinda suck?

Sure.

You know what sucks more?

Doing all the work to handle payments yourself.

First there’s setting up the systems, finding a payment processor, maybe negotiating on fees if you’re big enough to have some clout. Then there’s record-keeping and accounting to manage. Perhaps worst of all, there’s refunds and customer service. And while you can’t really satisfy customers when they buy via IAPs — because essentially they are Apple’s customers — when they buy from you, you need to have systems, processes, and people to handle complaints, concerns, failed deliveries, or refunds.

And you thought you were a mobile app developer?

Now you’re running a customer service division.

But that’s not all. To set up external iOS payments for in-app purchases, you have a lot of work to do with Apple and your app:

Request a StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement from Apple
Configure and enable the entitlement in your app
Change your development and publishing processes, most likely (because this is US-only right now, so you’re likely doing more work to create a custom app bundle)
Tell Apple where your external purchase will happen (and if that changes, you’ll have to resubmit your app with a new link)
Check whether a user can buy things by calling the canMakePayments API every time before sending a user to your payments page
Follow no fewer than 9 requirements when actually implementing the link out, including 1 that limits how often and where you can show the link
Follow Apple’s design guidelines

It might not be rocket science, but it’s not exactly easy either.

External iOS payments: subject to a massive 27% commission

After all that work, you might be tempted to crack a beer and yell FREEDOM!

But you’d be fooling yourself, because Apple’s pound of flesh is still getting collected.

“Apple’s commission will be 27% on proceeds you earn from sales (“transactions“) to the user for digital goods or services on your website after a link out (i.e., they tap “Continue” on the system disclosure sheet), provided that the sale was initiated within seven days and the digital goods or services can be used in an app,” Apple says. “If you’re a participant in the Small Business Program, or if the transaction is an auto-renewal in the second year or later of an auto-renewing subscription, the commission will be 12%.”

And if it’s a subscription, “each subsequent auto-renewal after the subscription is initiated is also a transaction.”

So you’re doing all the work, you’re paying the processing fee, you’re supplying the labor and infrastructure for customer support, and you’re getting a tiny discount on Apple-facilitated in-app purchases.

In other words, at this commission rate, external iOS payments are a non-starter.

But it gets better. As 9to5Mac reports, Apple reserves the right to audit you.

“To help ensure collection of Apple’s commission, developers are required to provide a periodic accounting of qualifying out-of-app purchases, and Apple has a right to audit developers’ accounting to ensure compliance with their commission obligations and to charge interest and offset payments.”

But you could try to play fast and loose, and Apple admits its options are limited:

“Although developers are contractually obligated to pay the commission, as a practical matter, with hundreds of thousands of developers with apps on the U.S. storefronts for the iOS and iPadOS App Stores, collection and enforcement will be exceedingly difficult and, in many cases, impossible.”

I’d advise against that.

It’ll likely work until Apple sets up something to monitor calls to the APIs that facilitate external iOS payments and start joining that data with commission data to look for high volume API calls not associated with significant commission revenue.

And then it’ll all blow up in your face.

So what’s an app developer or publisher to do?

Wait.

First of all, with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Apple’s going to have to provide something similar in Europe. Other nations are looking at similar legislation. So there might be something better coming.

Secondly, replacing a 30% commission with a 27% commission while doing less work is clearly abiding by the letter of the law while thumbing your nose at the spirit of the legal ruling. Somebody — maybe Epic, unless their legal war chest is exhausted — will challenge this at some point.

Apple will likely have to adjust this in the future, at which point publishers can take another look at their in-app purchase options and reassess.

Update January 18: Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney says Epic will challenge this:

“Epic will contest Apple’s bad-faith compliance plan in District Court.”

So: the court battles will continue!

Top 50 mobile games of 2024 (so far)

What are the top 50 mobile games of 2024 so far? I thought you’d never ask! We’ve just updated the list for January.

Globally we downloaded almost 300 billion mobile apps in 2023, according to Statista, and more than half of them were games. That’s up almost 50 billion app installs from the previous — an almost 20% increase in mobile app downloads — and we might be in for an additional jump in 2024. While apps recently finally surpassed games in the U.S. for the first time ever in terms of revenue — thanks to streaming media and subscriptions — the reality is that both globally and in both the U.S., games are both the vast majority of smartphone downloads and massively significant in terms of mobile revenue.

All of which means: it’s time to share the top 50 games of 2024 so far. Note: these are U.S. numbers.

Most downloaded mobile games so far in 2024

So far, according to Data.ai data, the top games of 2024 (so far) by downloads include some familiar names, but also some new ones.

On Android, the leaders are:

Monopoly Go!
Help Me: Tricky Story
Roblox
Match Frenzy: 1 Line Draw
Block Blast!
Traffic Escape!
Royal Match
Dice Dreams
Last War: Survival Game
Wood Nuts & Bolts Puzzle

On iOS, the top 10 games so far by downloads are:

Monopoly Go!
Twisted Tangle
Royal Match
Wood Nuts & Bolts Puzzle
Roblox
Last War: Survival
Block Blast!
Outlets Rush
Call of Duty: Mobile
We Are Warriors!

Note that these are the most downloaded games right now in early 2024. That’s a list that can be pretty volatile as different game publishers spend more or less to advertise their games to new players. It will change over time. But it’s still a major accomplishment to appear on this list.

Perhaps the biggest accomplishment: Monopoly Go! is a game just created and released in 2023, and right now very early in 2024 it’s a top game on both the App Store and Google Play. Another big one: the Wood Nuts & Bolts Puzzle game is just over a month old, and it’s already a top game by downloads. We’ll have to see if it keeps its momentum.

Important question: are the most downloaded games really the top ones?

Each of those mobile games has a lot of downloads, but number of installs alone can’t be enough to make the list of the top 50 mobile games of 2024 so far. Scale is good — getting a lot of installs is completely necessary for a game to be on top — but engagement and active players and actual usage is probably much more important. And probably most important is: are these games good enough and interesting enough and addictive enough to make players pull out their metaphorical credit cards and buy stuff? (Or, yes, allow Apple or Google to take a chunk out of your bank account.)

As we’ve built these lists over the years, we’ve felt the best way to determine the top games of 2024 so far is a combination of both:

how many installs a game received
how revenue a game is generating

That combination is important.

A top game should still be relevant to new players: it should be adding new people, or else it’s just slowly dying. Maybe that’s OK for a big studio: they’ve made their money. But it certainly takes them out of the top games sweepstakes. In addition, a top game should also keep existing players engaged, interested, and having fun for at least months, and preferentially years.

That makes it fresh enough for newbies, and still interesting for veterans.

The reality is that it is only the very unusual, extraordinary game that gets released years ago — even a decade ago, Subway Surfers! — and is still big. It’s an even more extraordinary game, like Clash of Clans, Roblox, or Call of Duty, that is still at or near the top of the revenue charts years and years after its initial release.

iOS, then Android, then combined

First, we’ll look at iOS.

iOS might seem small. After all, it only accounts for about 20% of global downloads: about 60 billion app installs for 2023 versus 240 billion for Android. But even so, iOS still takes credit for more than half of all in-app mobile revenue … thanks largely to the geographies where Apple owns market share: typically richer countries in North America, Europe, and certain parts of Asia.

Then we’ll look at Android, where the vast majority of app and game installs happen, especially in massive Android-centric countries like India. (And China, but data is hard to come by there thanks to the proliferation of third-party app stores.)

And finally, we’ll combine scores to arrive at an overall list of top 30 games of 2024 so far.

Note: the data will be US-centric. For installs, I’m looking at recent data from Data.ai: games that are hot right now, but the top grossing component of the score will bias towards games with some track record. And I’m weighting the scores about 2:1 in favor of revenue as a stronger engagement metric than pure downloads.

iOS: top 30 games of 2024 so far by downloads

Here are the top 30 mobile games on iOS by downloads.

1	Monopoly Go!
2	Twisted Tangle
3	Royal Match
4	Wood Nuts & Bolts Puzzle
5	Roblox
6	Last War: Survival
7	Block Blast!
8	Outlets Rush
9	Call of Duty: Mobile
10	We Are Warriors!
11	Township
12	Happy Match Cafe: Draw & Find
13	My Perfect Hotel
14	Subway Surfers
15	Dice Dreams
16	Tetris
17	GTA: San Andreas - NETFLIX
18	Match Factory!
19	Magic Tiles 3: Piano Game
20	Among Us!
21	Fishdom
22	8 Ball Pool
23	Whiteout Survival
24	Travel Town - Merge Adventure
25	Candy Crush Saga
26	UNO!
27	Wordscapes
28	NYT Games: Word Games & Sudoku
29	Epic War: Unlock Screws
30	Woodoku - Wood Block Puzzles

Note that 1 is from Netflix (GTA San Andreas) and 1 is from The NY Times … both nontraditional game publishers. We’ll likely seem more of that as we go further in 2024.

Also interestingly, many of these top iOS games by downloads are very familiar:

Roblox
Subway Surfers
Fishdom
Wordscapes

Android: top 30 games of 2024 so far by downloads

Here are the top 30 mobile games on Android by downloads so far in 2024:

1	Monopoly Go!
2	Help Me: Tricky Story
3	Roblox
4	Match Frenzy: 1 Line Draw
5	Block Blast!
6	Traffic Escape!
7	Royal Match
8	Dice Dreams
9	Last War: Survival Game
10	Wood Nuts & Bolts Puzzle
11	Subway Surfers
12	Magic Tiles 3
13	Geometry Dash Lite
14	Stumble Guys
15	Tetris
16	Weapon Master: Gun Shooter Run
17	Tile Family: Match Puzzle Game
18	Build A Queen
19	Candy Crush Saga
20	Devil May Cry: Peak of Combat
21	Melon Maker: Fruit Game
22	My Perfect Hotel
23	We Are Warriors!
24	Township
25	Paper.io 2
26	Nobody's Adventure Chop Chop
27	Word Search Explorer
28	Bluey: Let's Play!
29	Wordscapes
30	Toca Life World: Build a Story

No fewer than 7 of the top 50 games on Android are casino/Vegas/gambling games, compared to 5 on iOS.

More striking, perhaps, is the overlap between iOS top games and Android top games. Exactly half — 15 of the top 30 games — are tops in downloads on both the iOS and Android games lists:

Monopoly Go!
Roblox
Royal Match
Block Blast!
Last War: Survival Game
Wood Nuts & Bolts Puzzle
Subway Surfers
Dice Dreams
Township
We Are Warriors!
Candy Crush Saga
Magic Tiles 3
Tetris
My Perfect Hotel
Wordscapes

That makes sense on a lot of levels: good games rise to the top, big marketing budgets help make both the iOS and Android versions of a game to get popular, and everyone releases for both major platforms. Also, for battle games that require a critical mass of players to form clans or teams, or to match up in fights, being big on one platform tends to help a game get big on the other. Plus, of course, when a game gets popular it starts to generate its own buzz, and both people and platforms tend to start promoting it.

This is kind of a big deal. It means most big studios that publish in the U.S. market are publishing for both Android and iOS, and they’re experiences similar levels of success on both platforms, at least for their biggest games.

We’re also seeing a good amount of genre diversity, including strategy (Monopoly Go!), puzzle (Candy Crush Saga, Tetris), action (Roblox), and simulation (Township). Note: genres are hard to identify these days, as many games have many different elements of gameplay that bear little relationship to what category they’re actually published in.

And, clearly, while we’re seeing existing long-term leaders like Subway Surfers, Tetris, and Candy Crush Saga, we’re also seeing some newer games like My Perfect Hotel and Dice Dreams.

Top games on iOS by revenue

Revenue is an entirely different animal than downloads. You need downloads to get revenue, but you need much more: engagement, passion, longevity, and great gameplay.

Here are the top games on iOS by revenue in 2024 so far:

1	Genshin Impact
2	Candy Crush Saga
3	Royal Match
4	Roblox
5	Gardenscapes
6	Marvel SNAP
7	Coin Master
8	Pokemon GO
9	Township
10	Clash of Clans
11	Homescapes
12	Call of Duty: Mobile
13	Evony
14	Jackpot Party - Casino Slots
15	Fishdom
16	Bingo Blitz
17	Candy Crush Soda Saga
18	Rise of Kingdoms
19	Puzzles & Survival
20	Age of Origins: Tower Defense
21	Lightning Link Casino Slots
22	Solitaire Grand Harvest
23	Toon Blast
24	Cashman Casino Las Vegas Slots
25	Clash Royale
26	Slotomania Slots
27	DoubleDown Casino Slots Game
28	Project Makeover
29	Top War: Battle Game
30	Star Trek Fleet Command

Interestingly, no fewer than 21 games are on the top revenue list but NOT on the top downloads list. In many cases, that’s because they are games that have been around for years, have a devoted following, and make huge revenues without having to spend massive amounts of marketing dollars. In others, it’s because casino and strategy/battle games have very high earning potential compared to more casual or hypercasual titles.

Candy Crush Saga
Pokemon GO
Coin Master
Gardenscapes
Toon Blast
Clash of Clans
Homescapes
Age of Origins: Tower Defense
Jackpot Party – Casino Slots
Evony
PUBG Mobile
Puzzles & Survival
Candy Crush Soda Saga
Project Makeover
Cashman Casino Slots Games
Lightning Link Casino Slots
Clash Royale
RAID: Shadow Legends
DoubleDown Casino Vegas Slots
Free Fire: Winterlands
Triple Match 3D

Top games on Android by revenue

1	Monopoly Go!
2	Royal Match
3	Candy Crush Saga
4	Coin Master
5	Roblox
6	Township
7	Jackpot Party Casino Slots
8	Solitaire Grand Harvest
9	Pokemon GO
10	Bingo Blitz: Bingo Games
11	Evony
12	RAID: Shadow Legends
13	Gardenscapes
14	Whiteout Survival
15	Candy Crush Soda Saga
16	Fishdom
17	Call of Duty: Mobile
18	Cashman Casino Las Vegas Slots
19	Dice Dreams
20	Clash of Clans
21	Homescapes
22	Toon Blast
23	June's Journey: Hidden Objects
24	Slotomania Slots Casino Games
25	Lotsa Slots - Casino Games
26	Genshin Impact
27	Last War: Survival Game
28	Lightning Link Casino Slots
29	Puzzles & Survival
30	Doubledown Casino Vegas Slots

While 21 games are on the highest-revenue but not most-downloaded for iOS, only 17 are in the same scenario on Android:

Candy Crush Saga
Coin Master
Jackpot Party Casino Slots
Solitaire Grand Harvest
Bingo Blitz: Bingo Games
RAID: Shadow Legends
Cashman Casino Las Vegas Slots
Clash of Clans
Homescapes
Toon Blast
June’s Journey: Hidden Objects
Slotomania Slots Casino Games
Lotsa Slots – Casino Games
Genshin Impact
Lightning Link Casino Slots
Puzzles & Survival
Doubledown Casino Vegas Slots

Combined iOS and Android: top 30 mobile games of 2024 so far

At last, here are the top 30 mobile games of 2024 so far based on Android and iOS and number of installs plus amount of revenue, which is a proxy for players, usage, and engagement. The combined score is based on their ranking in both top downloads and top revenue lists, with revenue being weighted 2X as much as downloads.

1	Monopoly Go!	180
2	Royal Match	168
3	Roblox	160
4	Candy Crush Saga	130
5	Township	123
6	Coin Master	102
7	Pokemon GO	96
8	Whiteout Survival	92
9	Call of Duty: Mobile	90
10	Gardenscapes	80
11	Fishdom	72
12	Evony	68
13	Dice Dreams	63
14	Toon Blast	60
15	Clash of Clans	60
16	Homescapes	56
17	Candy Crush Soda Saga	54
18	Block Blast!	50
19	Wood Nuts & Bolts Puzzle	48
20	Jackpot Party Casino Slots	48
21	RAID: Shadow Legends	48
22	Solitaire Grand Harvest	46
23	Last War: Survival	45
24	Bingo Blitz: Bingo Games	42
25	Subway Surfers	37
26	Age of Origins: Tower Defense	34
27	Tetris	31
28	Last War: Survival Game	30
29	Jackpot Party - Casino Slots	30
30	Twisted Tangle	29

New apps for 2024 that did NOT appear on the top apps of 2023 list include:

Monopoly Go!
Whiteout Survival
Dice Dreams
Block Blast!
Wood Nuts & Bolts Puzzle
Last War: Survival
Twisted Tangle

Congratulations to those games for cracking the list. But a lot of games that were top performers in 2023 are still top performers so far in 2024, which is also deserving of congratulations:

Royal Match
Roblox
Candy Crush Saga
Coin Master
Township
Gardenscapes
Pokemon GO
Clash of Clans
Bingo Blitz
Homescapes
Call of Duty: Mobile
Candy Crush Soda Saga
Fishdom
Evony
Jackpot Party Casino Slots
RAID: Shadow Legends
Jackpot Party – Casino Slots

Interestingly, 7 of the 30 highest-revenue games on Android were gambling games, while 5 of the same list on iOS were. Clearly, there’s a lot of money to be made here, and game publishers are pursuing it aggressively.

Closing thoughts on the top games of 2024

My current favorite game is now 7 years old and didn’t make the list, although I see the publisher has a new game on the top list for 2024. So if your game didn’t make the list, you’re in good company.

There are plenty more ways to find and list the top games of any year, including 2024.

A good option would be to check all the game reviews of the year and see which ones are the highest rated by reviewers on Google Play and the App Store. I think I’ll try that sometime.

It’s also interesting to think about why a game might make the most downloaded but not the most profitable lists, and vice versa. Top-grossing games, for instance, might be in a monetization phase: they’ve gathered a huge number of players, and now they need to make some money back for all their development and marketing. And top games by installs that don’t hit the top-grossing list might just be in a category that doesn’t monetize super well — casual games, I’m looking at you — or might be focusing on scale rather than revenue.

In any case, if your favorite game didn’t make the list, that’s probably because with 10 million apps in Google Play and the iOS App Store, there’s a lot of choice. There’s something for everyone. And that’s probably a good thing.