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…
Category: Mobile Marketing and Advertising
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…
Keeping Mobile Gamers Engaged with App Widgets
I love using widgets. I probably have too many of them on my phone’s home screen. News apps, weather apps, stocks, stats. I love being able to glance through them without opening the corresponding apps. This led me to realize though that I have seen very few widgets for mobile games. As I started working…
Is Someone Else Using Your Game’s Monetization IDs?
Looking around app-ads.txt files one of the first things I was excited to check was whether DIRECT publisher IDs show up on other unrelated apps. To do this I ignored any apps that shared the same developer contact URL or Developer IDs. This doesn’t catch 100% of the legitimate publishers I checked, as the examples…
What A Mobile Ad Monopoly Looks Like
Google’s market share in in-app advertising is unmistakably dominant. The data above was scraped from 100k+ Google Play Store & Apple App Store apps (with a slight emphasis on games) who use advertising for monetization. This public data is made possible by adoption of IAB’s app-ads.txt standard which allows buyers and sellers to cross verify…