Installs fell 12%. Retention is the only lever left.

Everybody read the H1 mobile numbers and went "ok, flat." IAP came in around $39.8B vs $40.6B last year. Down 2%. Fine. Boring. Next.

Nah. Look one line down.

• Downloads: -12%, to ~24B installs
• Revenue per download: +11%
• Ad spend into mobile games: $7B, +7%
• Strategy led at $9.3B but slipped ~5%. Puzzle hit $8.1B with IAP up almost 20%

Naavik's take is that the install decline is across the board and structural, been building for years, Android doing most of the damage. That's the number I'd be staring at.

Because a market that holds revenue while its intake drops 12% isn't stable. It's concentrating. Same money, fewer people, each one paying more.

I lived a version of this at FoxNext running marketing on Marvel Strike Force. We were spending real money on UA every single day, and the thing that kept me up at night was never CPI. It was whether the cohort we just bought was still there on D7 (or became regulars).

You can win the CPI game and still lose the business. I've watched a channel deliver gorgeous cheap installs that evaporated by day three, and I've watched an "expensive" channel quietly carry the whole P&L because the people it sent us actually stuck.

That was a growing market. This one isn't.

So in this market:

1. You can't buy your way out of the top of the funnel anymore. NA gaming CPI was up 31% YoY to $1.68 in 2025. Europe was up 47%. Fewer installs on the board, each one costs more.

2. Every point of churn is now unreplacable. Global D1 for gaming is sitting around 27%. Three out of four people you paid for are gone by tomorrow. When the market was expanding you could out-pour the leak. You can't now.

If I'm running a mobile P&L this quarter, I'd:

• Buy fewer, better-fitting users. Use regularity measurement as the guide
• Test creative against D7, not CPI. (We ran weekly creative tests on MSF for exactly this reason, creative is the biggest early-funnel lever you have.)
• Treat lapsed players as an acquisition channel. They're cheaper than a stranger and they already know how to play the game.
• Ask the uncomfortable question: is our own monetization pressure driving the decay we keep blaming on the market?

Fewer downloads with flat revenue could just be a healthy shakeout. Cleaner ad ecosystem, less junk traffic, better users seperated from the noise. Sure.

When you can't grow the top, the only growth left is in the middle. And the middle is retention, which is a product problem at least as much as a marketing one. Teams that spent three years optimizing acquisition and filing retention under "someone else's roadmap" are about to find out what that cost.