APAC’s app marketing story shifts once you look past the regional headline. Finance and Entertainment are both growing this cycle, but for different reasons: payments infrastructure in one case, local content in another. That same layer also sits underneath engagement, retention, and paying users, with each one moving on its own pattern once you look past the regional number.

This edition analyzed installs, UA and remarketing spend, engagement, retention, and fraud across Finance, Shopping, Entertainment, and Gaming, across four APAC sub-regions and both major platforms, from Q3 2024 to Q2 2026. What stories sit underneath the regional numbers, whether the growth is organic or paid, by platform, or by a different metric entirely, is what this report sets out to answer.

The report covers:

• How Finance’s regional growth splits into two different stories once organic and paid are pulled apart
• Why device economics explain platform spend in Finance, Shopping, and Gaming, but not in Entertainment
• Which markets are growing sessions and installs while losing users at the 30-day mark
• What Gaming’s paying users reveal as installs keep falling
• How fraud exposure is evolving by platform as much as by region, and where a healthy average is masking the sharpest risk