First let’s recap, what is app-ads.txt App-ads.txt is a specification by the IAB to help fight advertising fraud. It works by a publishing app (they make money from the ads) linking their developer site with a txt file which has their advertising publisher IDs. Thus a buyer of the publisher’s ads can lookup the ID…
Category: Mobile Marketing and Advertising
Google Search Console Has Deindexed Nearly my Entire Site
Been troubleshooting this decline for months. About 6 months ago, before I started paying attention, AppGoblin had no meta headers, no canonical pages, and no SEO optimization of any kind. Many pages routinely took 10 seconds to load. At some point I took an interest in growing the site, it honestly only gets a few…
Top Business Tools for Finance Mobile Apps
Been updating AppGoblin to better represent some of the data, so I’m going to use this post today to explore the data a bit and see what we find for the most popular business tools for Financial Apps. To better understand the data, I added a breakdown of the top 5 companies for both iOS…
Open Source & Paid Alternatives to Firebase Dynamic Links
Dynamic deep links hosted by Google Firebase are on their way out, so it’s time to look for the alternatives. I’ll cover the few open source projects I’ve seen as well as the top paid options. Open Source & Free Really, all this work just to provide a link to your app? Yeah, it’s really…
AppGoblin New Features, Mobile Stats and Breakdowns
Theme & Svelte updates First off, new theme courtesy of the upcoming v3 for skeleton.dev, a great UI library for Svelte. The new Skeleton v3 is pretty awesome and was quite easy to update along with moving from Svelte 4 to 5. Svelte 5 was a bit trickier with all the new runes, but overall…
WIP: Sharing the Monetization channels for mobile apps
For a week or two I’ve been working on updating the appgoblin.info top ad networks and MMPs. Currently both are still up, which should change but I’ll give an overview of the process of changing and what might be next up. Goal: Display the top clients I’ve long wanted to have a way to view…
What does DIRECT mean for App-Ads.txt?
Recently I started working on a project on appgoblin to estimate the number of client apps for all mobile advertising and data collection companies. In doing this there are currently two sources of data: decompiled SDKs of which I have only done ~20k apps and app-ads.txt which I have scraped closer to ~200k apps’ app-ads.txt…
How to figure out which 3rd Parties might be integrated with an iOS App?
In the past couple months I built out scraping for Android apps which downloads, decompiles, scrapes the `AndroidManifest.xml` then analyzes the Android app for known 3rd party ad networks or trackers. I enjoyed this a lot, but the other half of the equation, iOS remained elusive. I was surprised how much more difficult this turned…
See which MMPs and Networks Apps and Games are Using
I recently added a free feature to AppGoblin to see which advertising/monetization ad networks and MMP partners apps are using. You can break down the results by category and and group by parent companies. The data is pulled from the top ~10k Android apps, which I downloaded, de-compiled and examined their AndroidManifest.xml to determine which…
AppGoblin: Free App Stats & Info
The past few weeks I spent building a front-end for an app store crawler that I made. The end goal is just to provide an open front-end for the apps details for the approximate 2.5m apps (already 1/2 those are no longer live) I’ve crawled from the Google & Apple stores. The site is now…