India, Aug 27: AppsFlyer, the Modern Marketing Cloud, today released the State of Marketing in APAC 2026, a report focused on the region’s app economy, drawing on 30 billion installs across nearly 12,000 apps across Finance, Shopping, Entertainment, and Gaming, from Q3 2024 to Q2 2026. The report found that growth across APAC’s app economy has become genuinely difficult to read. Installs, long-term retention, paying-user behavior, and fraud risk are all moving in different directions, sometimes in opposite directions within the same vertical and market.
“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,” said Ronen Mense, President and Managing Director, APAC at AppsFlyer.
Analyzing US$6.7 billion in combined user acquisition and remarketing spend across various app verticals, the report found that Finance installs grew across APAC, driven by expanding digital payment infrastructure, with organic installs up 55% on Android in India alone. And yet, on both platforms, Finance’s share of paying users fell in some of its strongest markets, including SEA countries like Indonesia.
Gaming tells the opposite story: Android installs fell 17% to 26% across every APAC sub-region, a decline that might look like a shrinking market. Its share of paying users, however, grew across every region and every platform, including 29% growth in the Indian Subcontinent on iOS and 28% in Indonesia on Android.
The retention picture adds further complexity. In APAC, Finance’s Day 7 retention on Android grew 45% year over year in SEA, a strong early signal. Day 30 retention for the same vertical fell 32% over the same period. That gap between early engagement and lasting retention showed up across Finance, Entertainment, and Shopping, in every region and on both platforms. Gaming’s early retention stayed largely flat, yet its Day 30 numbers still softened in step with the other three verticals. Across all four verticals, all four regions, and both platforms, Day 30 retention declined without exception.
The fraud picture follows the same pattern of a healthy headline concealing sharper risk underneath. Fraud rates declined broadly across APAC, with Shopping’s iOS fraud rate in SEA falling 90% and Finance’s iOS fraud rate falling 80% in the same region. Gaming’s Android fraud rate in Japan, however, rose 68% over the same year. Entertainment’s iOS fraud rate in the Indian Subcontinent rose 170%, even as the regional average continued to improve. Overall improvements in fraud can and do conceal worsening exposure in specific markets, platforms, and verticals.
Beyond the topline trends, the report also found:
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Finance organic installs grew 55% on Android in India, tied to UPI’s continued expansion. The broader Indian Subcontinent region followed at 46% on Android.
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Entertainment installs grew 42% on iOS in the Indian Subcontinent, driven by regional-language content now accounting for 52% of total OTT viewing in India. In APAC, Entertainment UA spend in Vietnam grew 194% on Android, more than seven times the regional pace.
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Finance remarketing conversions grew 268% on Android in Indonesia, against just 3% growth in paid installs over the same period.
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Shopping UA spend in India grew 55% on Android, linked to two major e-commerce sales shifting into September 2025 and concentrating a full season of activity into a single quarter.
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Gaming UA spend in SEA held roughly flat on Android while the paid installs it bought fell 36%, meaning the vertical paid approximately the same and received over a third fewer installs in return.
“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,” said Ronen Mense.