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Category: Mobile Marketing and Advertising

Quick Peek at DeepSeek’s Android Chinese SDKs

Posted on February 2, 2025 by James O'Claire

I took the afternoon to peek inside DeepSeek to see the various Chinese SDKs and tag some new Chinese companies AppGoblin wasn’t previously tracking (*cough* tencent, not sure how I wasn’t tracking that one yet). SDKs So I found three companies which I previously wasn’t quite tracking and added those in. So let’s go over…

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Why is an MMP ‘required’ for buying mobile app ads?

Posted on February 1, 2025 by James O'Claire

I got to join the GameMakers podcast along with AppsFlyer’s Brian Murphy and WildCardGames’ Josh Chandley to discuss how mobile app ad attribution platforms (MMPs) are basically required for running mobile ads. It was a great chance for me to pitch the first open source MMP, Open Attribution. Why are MMPs ‘required’ for buying mobile…

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Apple App Store Dropped Support for Anti Ad Fraud Specs

Posted on January 22, 2025January 23, 2025 by James O'Claire

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…

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Google Search Console Has Deindexed Nearly my Entire Site

Posted on January 6, 2025 by James O'Claire

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…

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Top Business Tools for Finance Mobile Apps

Posted on December 27, 2024 by James O'Claire

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…

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Open Source & Paid Alternatives to Firebase Dynamic Links

Posted on December 10, 2024February 5, 2025 by James O'Claire

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…

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AppGoblin New Features, Mobile Stats and Breakdowns

Posted on November 18, 2024 by James O'Claire

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…

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WIP: Sharing the Monetization channels for mobile apps

Posted on October 18, 2024April 15, 2025 by James O'Claire

Edit 2025: See the full list of the top monetization and ad networks on appgoblin.info/companies/ad-networks 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…

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What does DIRECT mean for App-Ads.txt?

Posted on October 15, 2024October 15, 2024 by James O'Claire

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…

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How to figure out which 3rd Parties might be integrated with an iOS App?

Posted on March 31, 2024October 6, 2024 by James O'Claire

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…

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Recent Posts

  • Contabo Defaults Encourage Using SSH Passwords
  • Mobile Trackers your Ad-Blocker Doesn’t Know About
  • Contabo Private Networks are a Pain
  • The 300 Most Common Android Data Endpoints (and the Companies Behind Them)
  • Uncovering Lesser Known Mobile Adtech Domains

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