AppsFlyer today published the 2026 edition of its Performance Index, the ranking of mobile advertising networks that the measurement company has issued since 2015. The edition draws on 27.2 billion installs from nearly 25,000 apps and ranks 57 media sources. According to AppsFlyer, rising attributed conversions and media costs pushed 9 of the top 10 media sources, and 17 of the top 20, to a year-over-year increase in ad spend. The bigger change sits underneath the tables: the index no longer uses retention to judge quality.

In Short

A company that counts which ads lead people to download apps has ranked 57 advertising networks by how much business they drive and how good that business is. Almost every big network got more advertiser money this year than last, and the company now decides "good" by whether advertisers keep spending more with a network, not by whether the people who downloaded apps kept using them. That changes what a top spot in the ranking actually says about a network.

What AppsFlyer published

The 2026 edition, labeled "The AppsFlyer Performance Index - 2026 Edition," went up on AppsFlyer's site today. According to the company, it contains user acquisition and remarketing rankings for Android and iOS, "covering up to 10 genres and categories across 11 regions," along with performance and volume rankings for Google, Meta, Apple, TikTok, Unity, AppLovin, Snap, Moloco "and many others."

AppsFlyer frames the year in upbeat terms. "A view of the media landscape in 2026 shows a healthy picture," the company states. Its headline reading of the leaders is short: "While Apple Ads and AppLovin take the lead in iOS, Android rankings are dominated by Google Ads," with Meta Ads "leading remarketing."

The edition also carries the second Creative Index, which AppsFlyer describes as a way to "find out which media sources excel in various creative video formats."

AppsFlyer is a mobile measurement partner, one of the firms app developers hire to decide which ad network gets credit for an install. That role gives it a vantage point few others have: it sees conversions across competing networks for the same advertisers, which is what makes a cross-network ranking possible in the first place.

A different definition of quality

"This year's edition also marks a major change in methodology," according to AppsFlyer. The company puts it in one sentence: "The Index now measures quality using quarter-over-quarter change in ad spend instead of retention."

The index has long been built on two kinds of tables. A volume ranking reflects scale, while a power ranking blends scale with quality. In earlier editions, the quality side leaned on how well users acquired through a network stuck with an app after installing. When PPC Land covered the 2025 edition in December 2025, Moloco's fourth place in iOS gaming was "supported by strong retention scores," and declines among Chinese device-maker networks such as Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi were tied mainly to lower quality scores.

Read literally, the new measure swaps a user outcome for an advertiser outcome. Instead of asking whether acquired users came back to an app, it asks whether advertisers raised or cut what they spend on a network from one quarter to the next. Budget movement becomes the verdict on quality.

There is a logic to that. Advertisers who see a network deliver profitable users tend to move money towards it, and spend data reflects decisions made with information - revenue, return on ad spend, lifetime value - that a retention curve does not capture. Retention has its own weaknesses, too: a network can deliver users who open an app every day and never pay.

The trade-off is that spend is not a pure quality signal. It moves with seasons, with prices, with a single large advertiser's budget cycle, and with the general health of the app economy. AppsFlyer's overview does not explain how the measure handles fourth-quarter holiday budgets, or how it separates a network charging more per install from advertisers buying more installs. That second point matters in a year when the company itself attributes higher spend partly to rising media costs. Does a network whose prices climbed now look like a higher-quality network?

More installs, fewer apps, fewer networks

Set against the previous edition, the headline totals move in opposite directions. The 2025 index, published on December 3, 2025, analyzed 16.2 billion non-organic installs from 39,000 apps across 88 media sources, covering up to 22 app categories in 11 regions.

On PPC Land's calculations from the two sets of published totals, the 2026 edition counts about 68% more installs, while the number of apps fell by roughly 36% and the number of ranked media sources by 35%. The category count drops from up to 22 to up to 10 "genres and categories," while the regional coverage stays at 11.

The comparison has a caveat. AppsFlyer's 2026 overview refers to "27.2 billion installs" without saying whether, like last year's figure, it counts only non-organic installs - those attributed to paid media rather than to people finding an app on their own. If the definition changed, the 68% figure says more about methodology than about market growth. The overview also does not state the period the data covers.

Nor does it explain why the list shrank from 88 to 57. Higher entry thresholds, a narrower category structure or the new spend-based method could each reduce the field.

Spend rising across the top of the table

The share of leading networks attracting more money rose sharply from last year. In the 2025 edition, 60% of the top five media sources saw year-over-year ad spend increases, 80% of those ranked six to ten did, and the share dropped "sharply to just 30% among ranks 11 through 20."

Converted into counts, that means 7 of the top 10 and 10 of the top 20 grew spend in 2025, according to PPC Land's calculations. This year AppsFlyer reports 9 of the top 10 and 17 of the top 20. The biggest shift is in the second tier: networks ranked 11 to 20 went from 3 in 10 growing spend to, by implication, 8 in 10.

AppsFlyer gives two drivers: more attributed conversions and higher media costs. The cost side matches what other measurement data has shown through 2026. Adjust's 2026 mobile app report put the 2025 gaming cost per install at $0.56, up 30%. In shopping apps, install costs in the UK and Ireland reached $3.85 in the first half of 2026, up 80% year over year, the highest in Adjust's dataset, with the US at $3.28.

Rising prices and rising spend can produce the same "healthy picture" from different causes. Advertisers buying more installs is growth; advertisers paying more for the same installs is inflation. The overview does not split the two.

Who leads where

AppsFlyer's summary names four leaders. On iOS, Apple Ads and AppLovin "take the lead," a phrase that leaves open whether they share the top across categories or split it - for instance between gaming and non-gaming apps. On Android, Google Ads dominates. In remarketing, Meta Ads leads.

Each of those positions has a history. In the 2025 index, Apple Ads ranked first in iOS gaming on power, but its lead over AppLovin narrowed from 43% to 28%, and AppLovin rose to second on volume. Apple Ads also led iOS non-gaming on both power and volume, with Meta Ads second. Google held first place on Android in both gaming and non-gaming.

Remarketing is where the 2026 summary reads as a change. Last year, "Google and Meta maintained their dominant leadership, ranking first and second in both power and volume rankings," with Meta overtaking Google for the first time only in iOS non-gaming remarketing. A Meta lead across remarketing as a whole, if that is what the summary means, would extend that shift beyond one platform and vertical. The overview does not say whether the lead covers both ranking types or both operating systems.

The commercial backdrop helps explain the iOS result. AppLovin reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $1.92 billion, up 53%, and opened its Axon advertising platform to advertisers worldwide in June 2026, ending referral-gated access. Apple, for its part, said in December 2025 that it would add more search ad positions in the App Store during 2026, with active search results campaigns enrolled automatically - more inventory for Apple Ads to sell to the same advertisers.

Measurement on iOS is still shaped by Apple's privacy rules. Since App Tracking Transparency required apps to ask permission before tracking users across other companies' apps, much iOS attribution has relied on Apple's SKAdNetwork framework and on modeling. PPC Land covered the first index edition to measure activity fully after ATT enforcement in March 2022, when Meta Ads, TikTok for Business and AppLovin topped a separate SKAN index.

The second Creative Index

The 2025 edition introduced the Creative Performance Index, which used AppsFlyer's AI-based Creative Optimization tools to tag gameplay mechanics, scene dynamics and emotional triggers in ads. In that first edition, AppLovin ranked first for gaming creative, followed by Moloco and TikTok for Business. In non-gaming, Google Ads, mainly through YouTube, ranked first, ahead of Meta Ads and TikTok for Business.

This year's version focuses on "various creative video formats," according to AppsFlyer. The overview does not list the formats or the winners. The index sits alongside a product push: in November 2025, AppsFlyer released eight products, among them a Creative Management Hub with AI-based scoring built on the same Creative Optimization suite, and a tool measuring incrementality for user acquisition across networks.

A referee with shareholders on the field

The 2026 edition is the first published since several of the ranked companies agreed to become AppsFlyer shareholders. On June 22, 2026, Google, Meta, Moloco and Unity agreed to minority investments in AppsFlyer at a $2.7 billion valuation, in stakes described as non-controlling and non-exclusive. The deal was subject to conditions including regulatory approvals.

All four investors are named among the media sources the index ranks. AppsFlyer committed at the time that investors would receive no preferential treatment in its APIs, measurement signals, attribution logic or commercial terms. The 2026 overview does not mention the investments. Still, the first edition that ranks AppsFlyer's own shareholders is also the first to use the new scoring method.

Measurement firms with ties to ad networks are not new. AppLovin owns Adjust, one of AppsFlyer's main rivals. Those ties make the published detail of any ranking method more relevant, not less.

The relationships between these companies are also not uniformly friendly. AppLovin went to court in San Francisco in September 2026 to stop Unity collecting data through its Ad Quality SDK, a dispute between two of the networks AppsFlyer names in its rankings.

Why the ranking matters

For app marketers, the Performance Index is one of a small number of cross-network benchmarks drawn from attribution data rather than from the networks' own reporting. Other measurement companies publish their own versions. Singular's 2026 ROI Index, published in April, added multi-touch attribution leaderboards and placed Apple Ads in its top tier of scaled networks, while noting that its findings come from its own client base. Results from different measurement companies are not directly comparable, because client mixes and methods differ.

The methodology change makes year-over-year comparisons within AppsFlyer's own index harder too. A network that climbs the 2026 power ranking may have improved, or may simply score better under a spend-based definition of quality than under a retention-based one. Without a restated 2025 ranking under the new method, the two editions measure different things.

Attribution itself keeps shifting. Snap made its Unified Attribution generally available to AppsFlyer and Adjust users in all markets on August 31, 2026, and AppsFlyer applies a maximum 72-hour probabilistic window to app installs from connected TV ads, against 30 days in MNTN's own system. Every change in how credit is assigned flows into the conversions that drive a ranking like this one. Fraud adds another layer: AppsFlyer's State of Fraud report in June 2026 found that organic traffic accounted for 52% of fraudulent mobile installs.

The edition's message on spend is unambiguous. The question its own method raises is what that spend is buying.

Timeline

Summary

Who: AppsFlyer, the mobile measurement company, and the 57 media sources it ranks, among them Apple Ads, AppLovin, Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok, Unity, Snap and Moloco. Google, Meta, Moloco and Unity agreed in June 2026 to become minority shareholders in AppsFlyer.

What: The 2026 edition of the AppsFlyer Performance Index, built on 27.2 billion installs from nearly 25,000 apps. Rising attributed conversions and media costs pushed 9 of the top 10 media sources and 17 of the top 20 to year-over-year ad spend increases. Apple Ads and AppLovin lead iOS, Google Ads leads Android, Meta Ads leads remarketing, and quality is now measured by quarter-over-quarter change in ad spend instead of retention. The edition includes the second Creative Index, on video formats.

When: Published today. AppsFlyer's overview does not state the period the data covers.

Where: Rankings cover Android and iOS, up to 10 genres and categories, and 11 regions.

Why: App marketers use the index to compare networks on scale and quality. The switch from retention to spend change alters what a high power ranking means, makes comparisons with earlier editions harder, and arrives in the first edition published since four ranked networks agreed to invest in AppsFlyer.