App Tracking Transparency Continues to Hurt – The Most Downloaded Games

Ariel Ariel
5/12/22

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #113 - That's Pretty Ambitious!. Check out the full article for more insights.


I crunched the numbers and ranked the most downloaded games in April, and even though this list has a variety of hypercasual titles, I think it's obvious that a whole year in, Apple's App Tracking Transparency is continuing to make ROI positive advertising a challenge.

Subway Surfers was the most downloaded app in the world in April, scoring 30 million new estimated downloads. It lost its top spot in March after holding it firmly since October, but now it's back.

The rest are, well, a little all over the place. Just like March.

Merge Master was the second most downloaded game in the world, with about half the downloads. The hyper-casual title added 15 million estimated downloads in April, most of which came from Google Play, with only a handful coming from the App Store.

Ludo King, Candy Crush, and Roblox round off the top 5, and a couple of hyper casuals, Garena Free Fire Max (the one that isn't banned in India), and an oldie, occupied the bottom of our list.

Summer is right around the corner, and ATT or not, games need to spend to get visibility. I'm sure we'll see more of this next month.

Together, the top 10 most downloaded games in the world accumulated 143 million downloads in April, roughly 12% lower than March. That's not a scary decrease all things considered, but I'm very interested in seeing what the summer will look like.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.


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