AppsFlyer today unveiled its comprehensive State of App Marketing in Asia 2025 report, revealing the region’s remarkable mobile growth trajectory and the strategic evolution reshaping the app economy.
Asia has achieved unprecedented scale, tripling its app installs in just six years and growing by 150%. The region now accounts for more than half of global mobile activity, driven by expanding smartphone penetration, maturing digital economies, and sophisticated full-funnel performance marketing strategies.
“Asia’s app economy has entered a transformative phase characterized by exceptional complexity alongside sustained growth, and the region now hosts the world’s most dynamic mobile markets and sophisticated marketing ecosystems,” said Ronen Mense, President and Managing Director of APAC, AppsFlyer. “Beyond sheer scale lies a fundamental evolution: the decisive shift from volume-driven acquisition to strategy-led performance optimization. India, Indonesia, and the Philippines have emerged as critical growth engines, each requiring precisely calibrated creative, pricing, and product strategies to unlock value at scale. Our new report, launching after our latest successful MAMA Asia event, examines that strategic evolution and provides a comprehensive framework for marketers seeking to navigate Asia’s next chapter with strategic clarity and purposeful execution.”
The report analyses billions of app interactions across 14 Asian markets, revealing how marketers are navigating divergent growth strategies. While emerging markets prioritize speed and scale, mature markets emphasize user quality, privacy compliance, and profitability optimization.
Key Findings from the 2025 Report:
• $14.77 billion in user acquisition spend. Finance, Food & Drink, and Shopping verticals dominate investment, with marketers doubling down on performance-driven strategies across emerging and mature markets.
• Gaming hybrid monetization grew 3.4x since 2023. Non-gaming verticals increasingly rely on in-app purchases for revenue stability, while gaming successfully balances ads and purchases for optimal monetization.
• $4.47 billion invested in remarketing campaigns. Lifecycle marketing has become critical, especially in high-growth markets like India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, signaling a strategic shift toward full-funnel engagement.
• Bots comprised over 80% of fraudulent installs in 2024. Fake publisher fraud increasingly targets re-engagement campaigns, particularly on iOS, while install hijacking shows declining trends across the region.
Strategic Market Segmentation
The report identifies two distinct growth paradigms across Asia’s diverse markets, emerging versus mature markets, and platform versus vertical strategy. Emerging markets, led by countries like India, prioritize high-velocity, cost-efficient user acquisition strategies to capitalize on rapid market expansion. These markets emphasize scale and speed, focusing on broad reach to capture the expanding user base as smartphone penetration accelerates.
Vertical performance patterns show Food & Drink and Shopping categories demonstrating strong recovery momentum following earlier market disruptions, while Gaming maintains consistent growth through increasingly sophisticated hybrid monetization models that balance advertising revenue with in-app purchases.
The data reveals Asia’s app marketing landscape rapidly diversifying, with marketers implementing increasingly nuanced strategies tailored to specific platforms, verticals, and user segments.
Methodology
The 2025 Asia App Marketing Report is based on anonymized and aggregated data sourced from AppsFlyer’s platform, covering over 30,000 apps, 15 billion installs, and $14 billion in user acquisition and remarketing spend across Android and iOS. The data spans January 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025, and includes 14 key markets in Asia, such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Australia. Insights were drawn from app categories with statistically significant activity, including Gaming, Finance, Shopping, Food & Drink, and Entertainment. Fraud trends were identified using AppsFlyer’s proprietary machine learning-based detection tools, analyzing patterns such as bot-driven installs, install hijacking, and fake publisher fraud. All monetary values are in USD, and data has been normalized to account for market size, attribution differences, and regional skews to ensure an accurate and representative view of Asia’s mobile marketing landscape.
(Image by Iqbal Nuril Anwar from Pixabay)