Adjust, the AppLovin-owned app measurement company, on September 30, 2026 sent subscribers its Mobile app trends spotlight edition: Türkiye 2026, a 29-page benchmark drawn from apps it tracked between January 2024 and July 2026. E-commerce sessions in Türkiye rose 4 per cent year on year in the first half of 2026, while the worldwide figure barely moved; finance apps kept users longer than regional and global benchmarks at every measured point to day 30; and games trailed the global retention curve from the first day after install.

In Short

Adjust, a company that counts app downloads and how people use apps, published a report on game, money and shopping apps in Türkiye. Turkish shopping apps grew faster than the world average and money apps held on to their users longer, but Turkish games lost new players faster than games elsewhere. If you buy app advertising in Türkiye, the report gives you local numbers to set against the global averages most planning relies on.

A benchmark from inside the measurement layer

Adjust is a mobile measurement partner, the independent party that app advertisers pay to decide which advertisement earned an install and to log what the new user does afterwards. That position gives it a view of installs, sessions and retention across a large pool of apps, and it is the source of every proprietary number in the Türkiye report. It is also a reason to read those numbers with care. AppLovin has owned Adjust since 2021, and AppLovin sells advertising into the same app economy that Adjust counts.

The point drew fresh attention in June, when Google, Meta, Moloco and Unity took stakes in AppsFlyer at a $2.7bn valuation in a deal framed around keeping attribution neutral. PPC Land's coverage of that transaction described Adjust as generally considered the second-largest firm in the category. Its parent reported second-quarter revenue of $1.92bn, up 53 per cent, on August 5.

According to Adjust, the dataset combines its top 5,000 apps with the total set of apps it measures, drawn from two sources: one covering a list of 45 countries and another covering about 250 countries and territories under the ISO 3166-1 standard. The data is aggregated and anonymised, and the company cautions that it may not reflect the entire global app market. Three verticals are covered - games, finance and fintech, and shopping and e-commerce - across three geographies: global, MENAT and Türkiye. The document does not say which of its two sources feeds which chart.

Nor does it expand MENAT. If the abbreviation carries its usual meaning of the Middle East, North Africa and Türkiye, the country's own data sits inside the regional benchmark it is compared with, which compresses any gap between the two by construction.

The edition is the latest in a run of regional cuts. Adjust published a LATAM spotlight on April 22, which put finance sessions across six Latin American markets up 62 per cent in 2025, and a Vietnam edition in late May. Its shopping app report on August 27 priced e-commerce installs in the United Kingdom and Ireland at $3.85, the highest in its dataset, and listed Türkiye among the countries with country-level data.

A young, connected and export-minded market

According to Adjust, 81.9mn of Türkiye's 87.7mn people maintain active mobile connections and 77.5mn use the internet regularly, penetration rates of 93.3 and 88.3 per cent. A median age of 33.5 keeps the user base, in the report's words, "squarely in its most valuable years for app engagement".

E-commerce volume reached $115.43bn in 2025, up 52.2 per cent, and the Turkish Ministry of Trade's ETBİS report places the country on course to be the world's fourth-fastest-growing e-commerce market through 2030, the report says. It does not state whether the 52.2 per cent rise is measured in lira or dollars, a distinction that matters in an economy where consumer prices have climbed steeply in recent years. Trendyol, described as the country's flagship marketplace, now ranks third globally in fast fashion, ahead of Zara and Asos, according to Adjust.

Gaming is where the export story is sharpest. Turkish developers earned $2.76bn worldwide in 2025, up from $504mn in 2020, a rise of roughly 450 per cent that lifted their share of the global mobile games market from 1 to 5 per cent. Turkish players spent $347mn on games at home in the same year. The report draws its own conclusion: "this is a country that makes games far more than one that buys them." Dream Games alone generated $1.7bn in 2025, and its two titles, Royal Match and Royal Kingdom, have earned more than $5.2bn combined since release.

These market-level figures come from outside sources that the report hyperlinks but does not name in its text. The installs, sessions, session lengths and retention rates that follow are Adjust's own.

Başak Zerman, Adjust's director for the Middle East, Türkiye and Africa, wrote in the report that capitalising on the market's momentum in 2026 "requires extreme precision". She argued that pairing predictive AI analytics with privacy-first measurement would allow marketers to convert high-value capital into long-term return on investment - a prescription that maps closely onto the products her employer sells.

Games: longer sessions, thinner retention

Installs and sessions

Gaming app sessions in Türkiye grew 6 per cent year on year in the first half of 2026, according to Adjust, matching the global rate. MENAT grew 14 per cent, the fastest of the three benchmarks. Within the half, January installs ran 19 per cent above the H1 average and sessions 11 per cent above it, and March produced a second peak of 11 per cent above average on both metrics.

The report calls the January to March pattern "a fixture of the Turkish gaming calendar". In 2025, January installs were 40 per cent above that year's average and sessions 17 per cent higher, while March added 22 per cent on installs and 14 per cent on sessions. Full-year 2025 sessions rose 6 per cent.

Growth by subvertical was uneven. Card battlers led install growth at 47 per cent, followed by trivia at 34 per cent, idle RPG at 29 per cent and swap games at 22 per cent; strategy rose 19 per cent, racing 12 per cent, match 11 per cent and casino 9 per cent. Sessions told a different story. Merge2 and trivia each roughly doubled, at 101 per cent, casino sessions climbed 35 per cent and match 32 per cent, while FPS/3PS and swap titles grew just 2 per cent. Trivia posted the strongest combination of the two measures; strategy was the steadiest, up 19 per cent on installs and 18 per cent on sessions.

Adjust separates subvertical, which it defines as "the genre or what the game is about", from product model, meaning how a game is built, paced and monetised. A puzzle game, it notes, can be built as a hypercasual or a mid-core product. By product model, casual games led growth, with installs up 49 per cent and sessions up 76 per cent. Mid-core installs rose 5 per cent and sessions 3 per cent. Hybrid casual sessions grew 13 per cent and hypercasual sessions 1 per cent; the report gives no install growth figure for either of those two models.

Where the play happens

"Action is the engagement engine of Turkish mobile gaming," the report states. Action titles generated 33 per cent of all gaming sessions in H1 2026 from 10 per cent of installs. Sport games converted 7 per cent of installs into 15 per cent of sessions and strategy turned 6 per cent into 11 per cent, while puzzle came closest to parity among the high-volume genres at 17 per cent of installs and 13 per cent of sessions.

Simulation took the largest share of installs, 19 per cent, followed by puzzle, arcade at 15 per cent and action. Platformer/runner (9 per cent), sport (7 per cent) and strategy (6 per cent) came next. Racing, casino, FPS/3PS, match, merge2, music/rhythm, word and RPG each accounted for 3 per cent or less.

The split by product model is starker still. Mid-core games accounted for 12 per cent of installs and 51 per cent of sessions, the only model returning more than four times its install share. Hypercasual took 53 per cent of installs but only 18 per cent of sessions. Casual delivered 17 per cent of installs and 19 per cent of sessions; hybrid casual took 18 and 12 per cent. Put plainly, more than half of the installs in Turkish gaming went to the model that produced less than a fifth of the sessions.

Session length and retention

Average gaming session lengths in Türkiye rose for a third consecutive period, reaching 33.69 minutes in H1 2026 from 32.61 in 2025 and 31.11 in 2024, an increase of about 8 per cent over two years. The global average held close to 30 minutes, at 30.42, 30 and 30.52 across the same periods. MENAT climbed to 32.43 minutes; the report's text gives its 2024 starting point as 29.99 minutes while the accompanying chart shows 29.98, a minor inconsistency.

MMORPG sessions were the longest of any subvertical, at 96.81 minutes, up from 88.43 in 2025. Action reached 47.44 minutes and strategy 41.87. Platformer/runner sessions rose most in relative terms, from 15.14 to 17.35 minutes, about 15 per cent, while music/rhythm stayed the shortest at 12.61. By product model, mid-core sessions lasted 43.32 minutes against 41.59 a year earlier, casual rose from 23.18 to 26.24, hybrid casual from 21.95 to 22.71 and hypercasual barely shifted, from 21.61 to 21.72.

Retention is where Türkiye falls behind. Day 1 retention was 20 per cent, day 7 was 6 per cent, day 14 was 3 per cent and day 30 was 1 per cent, according to Adjust. MENAT followed a similar curve with day 1 one point higher at 21 per cent. The global benchmark sat above both throughout: 27 per cent on day 1, 13 per cent on day 7 and 5 per cent on day 30. Those global figures match what Adjust published for full-year 2025 in its Mobile App Trends 2026 edition in February, which recorded day 1 at 27 per cent, day 7 at 13 per cent and day 30 at 5 per cent - a global curve that has not moved. Adjust measured gaming day 1 retention across Latin America at 20 per cent in 2025, the same level as Türkiye.

The report says Turkish gaming retention "improved across the funnel" in H1 2026, but it publishes no earlier figures for the all-games curve, so the claimed improvement cannot be checked from the document. It does give day 1 retention for four subverticals: RPG rose from 16 to 19 per cent, and card battler, platformer/runner and trivia each moved from 20 to 21 per cent.

Adjust does not connect the retention gap to the install mix. The two sit side by side nonetheless. A market in which hypercasual titles take 53 per cent of installs and mid-core titles hold 51 per cent of sessions would be expected to show a steep early drop-off alongside long sessions among the players who remain - which is the shape Adjust's numbers describe.

Doruk Bileke, director of growth at Rollic, framed the same tension in the report. "The next phase will be about combining that creative speed with deeper gameplay and richer progression," he said. "As the gap between installs and engagement becomes clearer, studios that evolve successful concepts into experiences players return to over time will define the next generation of global games from Türkiye."

Finance: the stickiest users, the slowest growth

Finance app sessions in Türkiye grew 2 per cent year on year in H1 2026, against 12 per cent in MENAT and 29 per cent globally, according to Adjust. The report describes this as a return to growth after a softer 2025. Installs rose 16 per cent across 2025, with April 27 per cent and May 34 per cent above that year's average, and October a further 16 per cent above it. In 2026, installs opened 10 per cent above the H1 average in January and 8 per cent above in March, with April level.

Sessions ran 3 to 4 per cent above the H1 average in January, March and July, the report says. July falls outside the first half. Either the average covers more than six months or July is being measured against a period it does not belong to; the document does not explain which. The same construction appears in the e-commerce section.

Three subverticals are broken out. Stock trading installs grew 41 per cent and sessions 43 per cent. Bank installs rose 31 per cent but sessions only 8 per cent, and insurance installs climbed 24 per cent with sessions up 14 per cent. All three grew sessions faster than the 2 per cent recorded for finance as a whole. That arithmetic implies the categories not shown - which may include the crypto and buy now, pay later apps the report measures elsewhere - fell or carry heavy weight in the total. Adjust does not say which.

Finance sessions are short and getting shorter in Türkiye: 6.12 minutes in H1 2026, against 6.18 in 2025 and 6.5 in 2024. MENAT sat at 6.31 minutes, while the global average rose to 8.27 from 7.25 and 6.71. Crypto apps were the exception, with sessions lengthening from 13.99 to 15.11 minutes; BNPL sessions edged from 4.53 to 4.66. Day 1 retention for crypto and stock trading apps each rose from 14 to 15 per cent.

On retention, the Turkish lead is consistent. Day 1 retention reached 14 per cent, against 13 per cent in MENAT and 12 per cent globally. By day 7 Türkiye held 7 per cent, against 6 and 5 per cent; by day 14, 5 per cent against 4 and 3 per cent. On day 30 the figure was 4 per cent, double the global 2 per cent and a point ahead of MENAT.

The report's opening section goes further, stating that finance "held the strongest retention of any vertical tracked in this report". That holds from day 7 onwards, when finance's 7 per cent edges past the 6 per cent recorded for both games and e-commerce. It does not hold on day 1, when Turkish games retained 20 per cent of new users against finance's 14 per cent.

Elsewhere the pattern has run the other way. Adjust's February report showed global finance sessions up 21 per cent in 2025 despite a 4 per cent fall in installs. Turkish finance users, by contrast, stay - but they do not open the apps much more often. Why would the most loyal users in the report also be the least active growth story? The document offers no answer.

Deniz Gizem Deniz, digital marketing executive at Enpara, wrote that mobile in Türkiye "has moved beyond being an alternative banking channel to become central to customers' financial lives", and that "sustainable growth will depend less on user acquisition and more on understanding customers' evolving needs and building long-term loyalty". Mert Altaç of Paribu, who works in exchange and operations, said interest in crypto assets is growing rapidly on the back of mobile adoption, but argued that "making access easier alone will not make this growth sustainable".

Shopping and e-commerce

E-commerce sessions in Türkiye hit a new high in H1 2026, according to Adjust. Sessions in January were 4 per cent above the H1 average and peaked 6 per cent above it in March. Installs were highest in May and July, each 7 per cent above average - July again sitting outside the half it is compared with. Late-year momentum has been the pattern in earlier years: November 2025 sessions were 15 per cent above that year's average, December 10 per cent and October 6 per cent.

Year on year, Turkish e-commerce sessions grew 4 per cent in H1 2026, against 0.3 per cent globally. The comparison chart carries no MENAT figure for this vertical. Shopping apps grew sessions 5 per cent and marketplace and classifieds apps 4 per cent.

Turkish e-commerce session lengths rose to 8.63 minutes from 8.56 in 2025, though they remain below the 9 minutes of 2024. MENAT edged up to 8.72 minutes. The report says the global average "moved the other way", easing to 10.32 minutes, though it measures that decline from 2024's 11.23 minutes rather than 2025's 11.11, a different baseline from the one it uses for Türkiye.

E-commerce apps in Türkiye retained 14 per cent of users on day 1, ahead of MENAT and the global benchmark at 13 per cent. By day 7 all three converged at 6 per cent, and Türkiye matched MENAT at 4 per cent on day 14. The text gives no day-30 figure for the vertical.

Context matters here. The global February report recorded e-commerce installs down 10 per cent in 2025 with sessions up 5 per cent, so a 0.3 per cent global rise in the first half of 2026 marks a slowdown in engagement growth rather than a collapse. Trendyol, meanwhile, was a named case study in Meta's Cannes Lions material in June, where Trendyol Group's head of growth described its use of Meta Business Agent on WhatsApp.

Two retailers quoted in the report emphasised what happens after the install. Mehmet Önay, digital marketing manager at Migros One, said that as digital grocery shopping becomes routine, "customers are looking for more than speed", expecting availability, value and consistency across digital and physical touchpoints. Ali Çaydar, performance marketing director at Hepsiburada, said success "will be defined not only by how effectively platforms acquire customers but by how well they engage and serve them over time".

AI apps: Sensor Tower figures and two Turkish publishers

The report's AI section relies on Sensor Tower's State of Mobile 2026 rather than Adjust's own data. According to those figures, generative AI app downloads in Türkiye rose from 33.3mn to 82.9mn in 2025, up 149 per cent. Time spent grew faster, up 375 per cent to 926mn hours, against 259 per cent globally, and sessions climbed 341.2 per cent, against 256 per cent worldwide. Revenue rose from $15mn to $50.2mn, up 235 per cent. ChatGPT led downloads, followed by Google Gemini, Grok, Chatbot AI - Search Assistant and DeepSeek, and 94.5 per cent of AI-related web traffic in Türkiye goes to ChatGPT, against 81 per cent worldwide.

Two Turkish publishers feature prominently. Codeway runs more than 60 AI-powered apps, including Ask AI and Retake AI, with more than 600mn downloads, according to the report. HubX has more than 40 apps and 600mn users across more than 190 countries, and took its first outside investment in August 2026: up to $75mn from Point72 Private Investments, making it Türkiye's eighth unicorn and its first AI-native one. HubX has said the money will go toward scaling its existing portfolio and acquiring other consumer apps.

Codeway has already surfaced in measurement news. When Snap took Unified Attribution global on August 31 for advertisers using AppsFlyer or Adjust, Codeway reported an 18 per cent lower cost per install at 1.8 times the scale through Adjust - an advertiser-supplied case figure rather than an independent evaluation.

Policy is moving in parallel. Türkiye's 2026-2030 AI Action Plan took effect in August 2026 by presidential circular, setting up a National AI Research Fund and an AI Growth Fund on top of grants of up to TL 50mn that have funded Turkish-language LLM projects since mid-2025, according to the report. Adjust expects localised conversational AI, of the kind BetterSpeak, TurkGPT and the major bank assistants run on, to become cheaper to build as domestic models mature - and more funded competitors to enter the same categories.

AI is also embedded in apps people already use. Garanti BBVA's assistant Ugi, rebuilt on an LLM, handled 73mn conversations last year for 8mn customers. Trendyol runs a 24/7 seller assistant it calls "Ortak", alongside personalised customer assistants and smart search, treating AI as "the operating system" behind its growth. Enterprise AI adoption in Türkiye nearly tripled between 2021 and 2025, from 2.7 to 7.5 per cent, and reached 24.1 per cent among companies with 250 or more employees. The domestic generative AI market is forecast to grow from $410mn in 2025 to $1.6bn by 2034, a forecast the report notes rests on third-party estimates.

What else the September 30 newsletter carried

Measurement product changes

The email that distributed the report also listed product changes. Under Ad Spend Integration, Adikteev ad spend now supports CTV campaigns, Taboola ad spend is available, and Aarki (RZR) now includes Publisher App Store ID-level data in its integration, according to Adjust. Taboola has been building television links of its own, including a CTV performance product with LG Ad Solutions in December 2025.

The Fraud Prevention Suite now offers anonymous IP filtering for post-install activities, configured in the Fraud Prevention settings in AppView. Post-install traffic is where fraud has been moving. AppsFlyer's State of Fraud report in June found organic traffic accounted for 52 per cent of fraudulent installs across 106.4bn installs and 246,000 apps, with spoofing the fastest-rising technique.

Conversion Rules can now validate parameter values sent by the tracking SDK directly, by matching, excluding, containing or checking for the presence of specific values. Event Rules can also be filtered by channel, campaign or ad group, so checks apply at the source level.

Smart Scripts, one of the web-to-app tools featured in the handbook Adjust published with Google Ads in September 2025, now recognises Microsoft Advertising traffic through msclkid and maps it to Bing Ads - the name Microsoft retired in 2019 - with no custom partner setup required. The msclkid parameter is the click identifier Microsoft's auto-taggingappends to landing page URLs; Microsoft began switching it on for eligible accounts in April 2024, and the company's Conversions API pilot treats it as central to attribution.

Halloween streaming installs

The newsletter's statistic of the month concerned streaming. On Saturday, October 25, the weekend before Halloween, global OTT and streaming app installs ran 120 per cent above the June to August daily average, according to Adjust, and installs in the United States and the United Kingdom that day were more than 350 per cent higher. The email gives no year. October 25 fell on a Saturday in 2025; in 2026 it falls on a Sunday and had not yet arrived when the email was sent, so the figure almost certainly describes the 2025 season. Adjust says a fuller Halloween analysis will follow on its blog.

Events and claims

Adjust listed three October appearances, the most relevant to this report being Istanbul Ignited by Slush'D at Rixos Tersane Istanbul from October 12 to 14, where chief executive Andrey Kazakov is scheduled to speak; the others are Brasil Game Show in São Paulo from October 9 to 12 and App Growth Summit Barcelona on October 15. The company also said it had won Best Mobile Marketing Platform at the 2026 Digiday Technology Awards, and promoted a case study on Care.com's move to its platform for attribution and deep linking.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Local benchmarks change the arithmetic of planning. A gaming campaign in Türkiye modelled on Adjust's global day-30 curve would assume five times the retained audience the company actually measured there. A finance campaign modelled the same way would assume half. Neither error is visible until weeks after the money is spent, which is why country cuts such as this one carry weight beyond their headline growth rates.

Consent is the second layer. Türkiye's data protection board issued Decision 2026/347 on February 18, published in the Official Gazette on March 24, requiring explicit consent texts and clarification texts to be presented as separate documents. Measurement SDKs, attribution and the retention curves built on them all depend on that consent being valid.

Monetisation is the third. Adapty's 2026 benchmarks placed Turkey at 0.7x in its country price comparison, with Germany charging 4.4 times more than Turkey for equivalent annual health and fitness access. Low domestic price points sit comfortably alongside Adjust's export figures: $2.76bn earned abroad by Turkish game developers against $347mn spent by Turkish players at home.

New surfaces are arriving as well. OpenAI's help centre lists Turkey among 63 ChatGPT Ads markets, without a published activation date, and ChatGPT Ads app attribution went live through AppsFlyer and Adjust in July. In a market where 94.5 per cent of AI-related web traffic already goes to ChatGPT, that combination is worth tracking.

Which leaves the question of the source. Every proprietary figure here comes from a measurement company owned by an advertising seller, in a report whose foreword ties its findings to Adjust's own products. Its global figures align with the company's earlier editions, and the internal slips flagged above are minor - but they sit in exactly the numbers a budget would be built on.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Adjust, the Berlin-registered mobile measurement company owned by AppLovin, with commentary from Başak Zerman of Adjust, Doruk Bileke of Rollic, Deniz Gizem Deniz of Enpara, Mert Altaç of Paribu, Mehmet Önay of Migros One and Ali Çaydar of Hepsiburada. The figures affect app advertisers, user acquisition teams and publishers active in Türkiye.

What: Mobile app trends spotlight edition: Türkiye 2026, a benchmark of installs, sessions, session lengths and retention across gaming, finance and e-commerce apps. Turkish e-commerce sessions grew 4% year on year in H1 2026 against 0.3% globally; finance apps held 4% of users at day 30, double the global rate, while sessions grew 2% against 29% globally; gaming retention trailed the global curve at every point, with 1% of players retained at day 30 against 5% globally. The distributing newsletter also listed changes to Ad Spend Integration, the Fraud Prevention Suite, Conversion Rules and Smart Scripts, plus Halloween streaming install data.

When: Distributed on September 30, 2026, covering data from January 2024 to July 2026, with year-on-year comparisons for the first half of 2026.

Where: Türkiye, benchmarked against MENAT and global figures; the underlying data spans up to about 250 countries and territories.

Why: Global benchmarks misstate Turkish performance in both directions - overstating game retention and understating finance retention - in a market of 81.9mn mobile connections whose developers earn far more abroad than at home. The data comes from a measurement firm owned by an advertising seller, and several internal inconsistencies are flagged above.