Asia-Pacific app marketers are seeing acquisition, retention and monetization move in increasingly different directions, according to AppsFlyer’s State of Marketing in APAC 2026.
The report draws on 30 billion installs across nearly 12,000 apps and $6.7 billion in combined user-acquisition and remarketing spend from July 2024 through June 2026. It covers finance, shopping, entertainment and gaming across Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, Japan and Korea, and Australia and New Zealand.
AppsFlyer said the data shows that install volume alone is becoming a weaker indicator of sustainable growth. In several markets, categories with rising installs saw weaker long-term retention or lower shares of paying users, while some categories with declining installs recorded stronger monetization.
Finance and gaming show opposite patterns
Finance installs expanded across parts of APAC, including a 55 percent increase in organic Android installs in India. At the same time, the share of paying finance users fell in some major Southeast Asian markets, including Indonesia.
Gaming moved in the other direction. Android gaming installs fell between 17 percent and 26 percent across every APAC sub-region measured, but the share of paying users increased across regions and platforms. AppsFlyer reported 28 percent growth in the share of paying gaming users on Android in Indonesia and 29 percent growth on iOS in the Indian Subcontinent.
Ronen Mense, President and Managing Director for APAC at AppsFlyer, said the divergence means marketers should avoid treating a single regional growth metric as a sufficient guide for budget decisions.
Long-term retention weakened across the board
The report found a broad gap between early engagement and longer-term retention. Finance Day 7 retention on Android rose 45 percent year over year in Southeast Asia, while Day 30 retention for the same vertical fell 32 percent.
AppsFlyer said Day 30 retention declined without exception across all four verticals, all four APAC sub-regions and both major mobile platforms included in the dataset. Similar gaps between early and longer-term engagement appeared in entertainment and shopping, while gaming’s early retention was comparatively flat but still weakened by Day 30.
The pattern suggests that strong acquisition or early engagement does not necessarily translate into durable usage. For marketers, that increases the importance of looking at retention and payer behavior alongside install growth rather than using acquisition volume as the primary signal.
Indonesia and Vietnam stand out in Southeast Asia
Indonesia produced one of the strongest remarketing results in the report. Finance remarketing conversions rose 268 percent on Android, compared with just 3 percent growth in paid installs over the same period.
Vietnam also stood out in entertainment, where Android user-acquisition spend rose 194 percent, more than seven times the broader regional pace cited by AppsFlyer.
In gaming, Southeast Asian Android user-acquisition spend was roughly flat, while paid installs fell 36 percent. That means marketers spent approximately the same amount while receiving more than a third fewer installs, according to the report.
Fraud improves overall but worsens in pockets
AppsFlyer also reported that headline fraud rates improved in much of APAC, but the regional averages concealed sharp increases in some combinations of market, platform and vertical.
Shopping’s iOS fraud rate in Southeast Asia fell 90 percent and finance’s iOS fraud rate fell 80 percent in the same region. By contrast, gaming’s Android fraud rate in Japan rose 68 percent, while entertainment’s iOS fraud rate in the Indian Subcontinent increased 170 percent.
The report argues that acquisition, retention, payer behavior and fraud should be assessed together because they can point in different directions within the same market. That becomes more important as marketing measurement expands beyond mobile apps into web, connected TV and other channels.
AppsFlyer said its dataset applies minimum volume thresholds and reports results only where those thresholds are met. The company did not disclose the identities of individual apps in the aggregated dataset.
Featured image: AppsFlyer