#ios-campaigns

#ios-campaigns

When someone taps your link in a social app or email, it often opens in an in-app browser (embedded browser), a contained environment inside that app. Those in-app browsers don't share cookies, logins, or referral data with Safari or Chrome. They sever the continuity that website-centric analytics depend on. So these sessions look like anonymous visits.

Mobile game developers have largely been locked into app store distribution as the primary way to reach players. RCS games live in the messaging inbox, the stickiest surface on mobile, where people are already spending huge amounts of time talking to friends and family. We're building on an interaction pattern people already use every day.

After launching almost three years ago, Meta's Threads is now reportedly attracting more daily mobile users than rival platform X. According to Similarweb data shared by TechCrunch, Threads has 141.5 million daily active iOS and Android global app users as of January 7th, compared to 125 million users for Elon Musk's mobile platform. Similarweb reports that Threads actually overtook X sometime between late October and early November after a consistent period of growth, meaning this milestone wasn't suddenly achieved in reaction to recent Grok-related controversies.

During my week-long binge, I played games that paused their own tutorials to run ads. I saw endless fake X icons and banners that hid the close button under the iPhone's Dynamic Island. Now, I'm not against ads, but I hate it when they feel like a penalty. I'm a gamer, and from what I've seen, PC and console games integrate ads much better. If mobile devs followed suit, mobile games might finally climb out of the mess they're in.

In the fintech vertical, where growth depends on trust, the decision to monetise through in-app advertising is a bold bet, one that could backfire if a bad ad experience undermines user confidence. But Toss, South Korea's leading fintech super app with over 25 million users, turned that risk into a major revenue win by implementing filters based on user-level relevance and using behavioural signals and first-party data to block disruptive or inappropriate ad categories.

In-app is far from a lawless, unpopulated no man's land of advertising. In fact, the latest stats show it's actually where audiences are spending most of their time. In the UK for example, just over two and a half hours a day are spent in the in-app environment, compared with only 20 minutes on the mobile web. That's a staggering 90% of the time on mobile spent in apps - whether messaging, social media, music, or gaming. It's a huge opportunity.

iOS 26 adoption isn't as bad as reported earlier. Not that it's great. Apple's attempt to keep online advertisers from tracking Safari users had the unintended effect of completely throwing off reporting on iOS 26 adoption. Rather than only a small percentage of iPhone users installing some version of Apple's latest operating system, iOS 26 adoption is only a bit below average.

Now, you might argue that I'm stretching the term "news" a little, since we've had ads in App Store search since 2016, and even this latest expansion of the program, creating multiple paid slots per query, was first floated last month. But you would be wrong, because we just learned two new nuggets of knowledge: the timeframe, and the markets which will get the extra ads first (the U.K., followed by Japan, followed by everyone else). So there.