User Acquisition in 2026: What Changed and Which Strategies Work

User Acquisition (UA), the work of bringing new users into an app, stopped being a race for cheap installs in 2026. Install volume has barely moved, while people keep spending more inside apps. The teams that stay profitable are the ones whose users subscribe and still open the app a week after installing it.

Over the past year the App Store added a second ad slot in search and dedicated marketing creatives for search results, custom product pages started ranking organically, Google cut its fees, and some users now find apps through AI assistants instead of the store. Below we look at what affects your budget, which metrics to track, and how to build a UA strategy for 2026.

The mobile app market in numbers

Last year's results set the rules for UA in 2026. Non-game apps outearned games for the first time: their in-app purchase revenue grew 21%, while games added only 1.3% and stalled at $82 billion. Generative AI apps drove the biggest growth, with 3.8 billion downloads and more than $5 billion in revenue for the year. The US is still the largest market, with users spending almost $60 billion in apps.

The trend held in 2026. In Q2, non-game app revenue rose 14.6% year over year to $24.4 billion, while games lost 4.5%. Spending on generative AI apps doubled over the same quarter.

Attribution data shows another side of the picture. Installs grew 10% in 2025 and sessions 7%, with Latin America growing fastest at +76% installs. The share of iOS users who allow tracking through ATT reached 38% in Q1 2026.

Paid is growing faster than organic. According to the year-end mobile gaming report, the share of paid installs rose 10% year over year, and top advertisers now ship 2,400–2,600 creative variations per quarter, 25–30% more than a year earlier. In H1 2026, mobile game revenue fell 2% while ad spend grew 7%. More money in the same auctions with flat revenue means paid traffic is getting harder to pay back.

How much a user costs in 2026

Install prices depend heavily on category and market. Here is how they changed over the year, according to Mobile App Trends 2026:

Game installs got a third more expensive and finance installs got cheaper, yet a finance app in the US still pays seven times more per install than the global average for games. A market-wide average is close to useless for budget planning. Compare against your own category and your own countries.

For subscription apps, what matters more is how many installers start paying. If an install costs $4 and one in ten users subscribes, each paying user costs you $40.

That is why CPI makes a poor headline metric. It helps you compare creatives and geos early on, but it says nothing about revenue. In 2026, budget decisions run on other numbers:

The core rule hasn't changed: LTV has to exceed CAC. What has changed is the margin between them. It keeps shrinking, and a blended CAC across channels hides the ones losing money, so you have to calculate it channel by channel.

What changed in the stores and channels in 2025–2026

Apple Ads: more ads in search results

Until 2026, Apple Ads had one ad slot above the search results. On March 3, 2026, Apple added a second slot further down the results, starting in the UK and Japan and reaching all markets by the end of March. You can't pick a position or bid on it separately; the auction decides. Spend, taps and installs in reports are still not split by position, and you can only see the difference through impression share.

This has two consequences. For expensive keywords, two advertisers now share one results page, so competition for the user's attention is higher. And the organic #1 sits lower on the screen, because ads now appear above it and between results. Where strong ASO on a keyword used to bring traffic with almost no ads, commercial queries now often need both. Before scaling, compare CPA and volume on your core keywords before and after March.

Custom product pages in organic search

Since July 30, 2025, you can assign keywords to a custom product page, and the App Store will show it in organic results for those queries. On October 29, 2025, the limit went up from 35 to 70 pages per app.

This changes how a product page works. One page used to sell to everyone. Now each keyword cluster can get its own screenshots and its own offer: someone searching for an expense tracker and someone searching for a family budget see different pages of the same app. An analysis of more than a million ad groups in Apple Ads found that keyword-matched pages deliver about 23% more downloads than the default page at the same bids and keywords.

Creative assets in App Store search results

At WWDC in June 2026, Apple announced marketing creatives for the store, and on October 5 they went live in App Store Connect. These are dedicated images and videos for the product page header and for search results, shown alongside screenshots. Users see the search creative before they tap, so it has a direct effect on conversion from search. Creatives go through review without an app update, can be added to custom product pages, and can be tested with product page optimization. They display on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, and Apple Ads support is promised later.

At the same conference, Apple launched personalized collections on the Apps, Games and Search tabs, for now in English in the US. Recommendations are based on user interests, so some installs will come without a search query at all.

Store search now reads user intent

In early June 2025, Apple changed its search algorithm without an announcement. ASO tools recorded record ranking volatility in the US: the top results began to cover several different intents for the same query. In September 2025, Google launched Guided Search in the US, which refines results when a query can be read in more than one way.

Both stores are moving from exact word matching to query meaning. You still need a semantic core, but it works better grouped by user scenario: what the person wants to get done when they type the query.

AI assistants as a new entry point

Some users now ask an AI assistant to recommend an app and only then open the store. The most popular assistant has had its own app directory since December 2025, and Google Play added the Ask Play assistant in 2026. There is no reliable data yet on how much traffic this channel drives. The figures that circulate in industry articles usually don't point to any actual research.

The mechanics, though, are clear. Assistants pull information from the open web: landing pages, help docs, reviews, ratings and media mentions. An app without its own website and outside mentions is almost invisible to them, no matter how good its ASO is.

Web payments and web-to-app funnels

Since April 2025, apps in the US can send users to pay on the web, and Apple currently takes no commission on those purchases. An appeals court allowed Apple to charge a reasonable fee, and in August 2026 Apple proposed 15% for most apps and 5% for Small Business Program members. The court hasn't approved these rates yet, and the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, with a decision expected in 2027.

Google Play has also allowed external links and alternative billing in the US since October 29, 2025, but has charged a service fee on them since October 1, 2026. Following its settlement with Epic, Google cut its standard fee to 20% and to 10% for subscriptions: in the US, UK and EEA from June 2026, and in other countries in stages through 2027.

For subscription apps, this opened a second monetization channel, and web-to-app funnels grew with it: an ad leads to web onboarding and checkout, and the user installs the app after paying. Data on iOS web paywalls shows the web doesn't always win. One app saw web conversion to purchase drop 26%, but revenue per user rose 53% because the team rebuilt its pricing. Another kept the same prices on the web as in the store, lost 9% of revenue per user, and went back to in-app purchases. Test web checkout as a separate product with its own pricing and plans.

Organic: what lowers the cost of paid traffic

Organic is still the cheapest source of users, and in 2026 it determines how much paid traffic costs. An app with a strong product page converts ad impressions better, so the same Apple Ads bid buys more installs.

Here is how ASO works in 2026:

• Scenario-based keywords. Keywords are grouped by user intent, and each group gets its own metadata and, when needed, its own custom product page.
• Custom product pages per cluster. Seventy pages are enough to cover your main scenarios, key markets and seasonal offers.
• Localization for growth markets. Install growth in Latin America and the Middle East turns Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic localization into a direct driver of install volume.
• Ratings and reviews. They affect both conversion and rankings, and now they also serve as a signal for AI assistants.

ASOMobile helps you pick keywords for each cluster, see which queries competitors already own, and track rankings by country. We covered how ASO itself has changed in ASO in 2026.

Outside the store, work on your web presence. A landing page that clearly explains features, pages for core use cases, help docs and mentions in industry reviews help both search engines and AI assistants. Community and user-generated content also feed organic: real discussions on social media and forums end up in the data assistants draw on.

Paid traffic: where to put your budget

The channel mix has barely changed, but the rules inside each channel have.

Apple Ads remains the channel with the highest-intent traffic, because users are already looking for a solution. After the ad slot expansion, matching custom product pages to keywords and tracking revenue per keyword matter more than install counts. Google App Campaigns run on Google's algorithm, so quality depends on which post-install events you send back to the system.

Meta and TikTok bring volume and suit broad audiences and web-to-app funnels. Here creatives are the main cost lever. They burn out within weeks, and even faster on TikTok, so the teams that win ship and test new concepts every week. AI tools have made variations cheaper to produce, but competitors produce them at the same scale, so in the end it's the idea that stands out.

Influencers and creators solve for trust, especially in finance, health and education. Creator content often turns into the best ad material, too.

One rule applies to every channel: optimize campaigns for events that bring revenue, such as trial starts, purchases and subscriptions. An install campaign brings people who install, not people who pay. And don't keep 80–90% of the budget in one channel: auction changes like the Apple Ads update in March hit hardest those with no alternative.

How to connect paid and organic in practice

Paid traffic and ASO reinforce each other when data flows between them. Here is the working loop.

The Apple Ads search terms report shows which phrasings actually bring paying users. Those words go into your semantic core and metadata. On keywords where the app already holds an organic top 3, lower the bids and check whether total volume holds. Test custom product pages in ads first, where results show within days, then assign the winning versions to organic keywords.

It works the other way too. A spike in installs from ads on a keyword affects organic rankings, so time a large campaign launch with a metadata update. ASOMobile lets you track keyword rankings before, during and after a campaign, so you can see what growth came from ads and what stayed in organic after the campaign ended.

Privacy and measurement

Attribution on iOS is still partial. About 38% of users allow ATT, and the rest of the data comes through SKAdNetwork and its successor, AdAttributionKit. Since April 2025, Apple Ads also reports attribution through AdAttributionKit, so you can compare Apple's ad channels and third-party networks in one system.

On Android, the direction reversed. In 2025 Google wound down Privacy Sandbox, and in October the UK regulator released the company from its commitments on phasing out third-party cookies. The shutdown of the Android advertising ID that the market had expected since 2022 never happened.

The practical takeaway for both platforms: keep an MMP for attribution, send events server-side rather than only from the app, and run an incrementality check every quarter. If you switch a channel off for two weeks and total volume barely changes, that channel was buying users who would have come anyway.

UA checklist for 2026

• Your main metric is CAC or ROAS D7 per channel, not CPI.
• Your semantic core is grouped by user scenario.
• Key clusters and markets have their own custom product pages tied to keywords.
• You have before-and-after CPA and volume benchmarks for core Apple Ads keywords.
• Search result creatives for iOS 27 are ready for your main keywords and custom product pages.
• Creatives are refreshed every week, and hypotheses are logged.
• Campaigns optimize for trials, purchases or subscriptions.
• No single channel takes more than half the budget.
• The app has a website, use-case pages and mentions in industry media.
• Subscription apps have tested web checkout with its own pricing.

Conclusion

In 2026, UA budgets pay off for teams that track revenue by keyword and by channel. Start with an audit: which keywords bring paying users, where competitors outrank you, and which scenarios still lack a custom product page.

Acquire users who stick around