A decade in mobile

From Pokémon GO crowds flooding city streets to the “Great Empty” in Paris, London, New York during the pandemic; from machine learning reserved for the deepest tech circles to AI drafting your emails with a single prompt—the past decade has been a study in “the biggest change yet,” again and again.

The same is true for mobile. In the ten years since Appodeal was founded, the industry has been reshaped many times over. Yet one trend holds: human patterns shape technology, and technology reshapes us in return. Today we look back, and invite you to do the same. A fitting exercise before turning to the next decade.

2015: The battle for user attention heats up, and deep learning lands in developers’ hands

When the iPhone debuted in 2007, the App Store offered around 500 apps. By 2015, there were 1.7 million, with Google Play slightly ahead at 1.8 million, as smartphones became the go-to screen for social, games, and utility apps, taking up nearly 3 hours of the average US adult’s day.

The unprecedented popularity of smartphones and mobile apps drove up user acquisition costs. It pushed developers to maximize revenue per user, ultimately leading to the rise of ad mediation, a system that helps apps work with many ad networks at once to serve the best-performing ad available for each impression.

“I built casual puzzle games when the App Store was shifting from $0.99 downloads to in-app purchases. Chartboost invented the interstitial, and ad networks introduced rewarded videos. Ad-based monetization changed the lives of thousands of developers, think David Reichelt with Color Switch or Dong Nguyen with Flappy Bird. I wanted to give as many people as possible access to this opportunity. That’s when I started Appodeal.”

Pavel Golubev,
CEO & Founder of Appodeal

Meanwhile, Google launched TensorFlow, an open-source framework that gave developers access to deep learning tools and marked a turning point toward the current AI boom.

2016: Pokémon went from screen to street, smartphone payments went mainstream

Smartphones found new ways to integrate into our lives. Some will remember the crowds of Poké-fans parading through the streets following the launch of Pokémon GO!, which not only made AR gaming a global phenomenon but also showed how mobile apps can drive real-world behavior. That same year, Apple Pay gained traction. Two years earlier you were a weirdo at checkout; by 2016, it barely raised an eyebrow.

In adtech, the rewarded video format proved more engaging than banners and interstitials, achieving greater user acceptance. Deep learning became the industry’s new buzzword.

“We spent our days manually tweaking ad waterfalls, prioritizing networks one by one. That was life before header bidding.”

Alexander Zhitlukhin,
CTO at Appodeal, who was then an Android engineer

2017: The hyper-casual boom and “Attention Is All You Need”

By 2017, smartphone penetration had crossed 50% globally, and mobile gaming had become the largest segment by player count. The hyper-casual boom took off with hits like Hello Stars, Ultra Sharp, Tomb of the Mask, and Bumper.io. From Q1 2017 to Q2 2021, hyper-casual installs in the US grew from a few percent to 40% of all mobile game installs.

Fast-cycled launches flooded app stores, driving the cost per install (CPI) to record lows and making it possible to profit through ad-driven lifetime value models. Around the same time, Appodeal rolled out its first ad exchange, a marketplace for impressions, built fully on the client SDK with no server component.

“Pretty big deal back when mobile internet crawled; at the same time, most creatives still came from the web, so there was plenty of rendering to do.”

Alexander Zhitlukhin,
CTO at Appodeal

Google introduced the Transformer architecture in its paper “Attention Is All You Need,” enabling models to capture long-range word dependencies and improve training speed and accuracy. It became the foundation for GPT and most modern LLMs. That year, Facebook also released PyTorch, now the go-to deep learning framework and the one Appodeal uses for its models.

2018: Privacy rules tighten and screen time arrives

As the world became increasingly reliant on smartphones, protecting user data became inevitable. In 2018, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force, requiring app developers and ad networks to adjust their practices for data collection, consent management, and attribution. Concerns about technology’s impact on our health also grew, prompting the introduction of screen time and digital wellbeing tools on iOS and Android to help address mobile overuse and addiction.

For Appodeal, it was the year we launched our first mediation SDK, letting developers connect multiple ad networks and automatically serve the most relevant ad for each user in real time.

“When GDPR, the goal was to make networks compete for every impression. Around that time I first met Pavel Golubev at Vungle’s office on Clara Street in San Francisco, where we discussed plugging Appodeal’s inventory into Vungle’s platform.”

Martin Price,
now VP of Product at Appodeal, then VP of Product at Vungle

2019: The TikTok takeover and (quiet) release of GPT-2

In 2019, mobile content consumption was reshaped by one app. TikTok became the most downloaded app worldwide, proving short-form video was the future and remains so today, with over 1.5 billion monthly active users.

That same year, OpenAI quietly released GPT-2, a language model that hinted at the AI wave to come. Back then it barely registered outside tech circles, while TikTok dances were stealing the spotlight.

In adtech, Google rolled out its Unified Pricing Model, preventing publishers from setting higher price floors for its AdX and AdSense than for rival exchanges. This pushed the industry further from waterfall to app bidding, where all networks compete in a single unified auction.

Appodeal outlined the shift of the ad tech ecosystem toward bidding in 2017. In 2019, the company built its first header bidding integration on top of MoPub.

2020: When we all learned to live remotely

Lockdowns drove mobile usage to record highs. According to App Annie, worldwide daily time spent in Android apps jumped 20% year over year in Q1 2020, with gaming leading the surge. Mobile games generated $68.3 billion in 2019, and by 2022 that number had grown to $98.2 billion.

“At Appodeal, this was the year the Appodeal Gaming was born. The goal was to acquire high-potential titles and position Appodeal not just as a monetization partner, but as a full-cycle publisher.”

Anna Kolyada,
General Manager at Appodeal Gaming

2021: The next stage of privacy regulation

Just as mobile marketers were adjusting to earlier changes, Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT). Users could now opt out of cross-app tracking, a move widely seen as a positive step for user privacy. However, it also sharply reduced the pool of identifiable iOS users. SKAdNetwork became the new standard, reshaping UA budgeting and creative testing across the industry.

For Appodeal, 2021 was a year of rebuilding: the team moved to Warsaw, opened a new office, and reengineered core processes.

“We automated user acquisition, rebuilt our business intelligence systems, and started working with machine learning. ATT hit us hard, but ultimately for the better.”

Alexander Zhitlukhin,
CTO at Appodeal

It was also the year Appodeal’s in-house programmatic exchange, Bidmachine, became a standalone platform, giving developers direct access to demand and enabling more transparent auctions without relying on opaque third-party exchanges. Appodeal also acquired NewPubCo, which went on to scale tenfold and become one of the top three word games in the US.

2022: When adtech became one of few

After years of rapid growth, regulatory shifts, and constant adaptation, the big players in adtech began consolidating. Publica was acquired by Integral Ad Science, Xandr by Microsoft, and AppLovin bought MoPub—just a few examples from a year when mediation options for developers started disappearing fast.

“At Appodeal, we doubled down on a developer-friendly stack, added more customization, and worked hands-on with partners. The shake-up pushed us to move faster and deliver more value where it actually counted,”

Anastasia Kalugina,
Publishing Operations Lead

It was also a big year for AI going visual. OpenAI dropped DALL·E 2 in April, with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion following in the summer. Suddenly, anyone could create high-quality, photorealistic images in seconds, although plenty came with extra fingers, melting faces and other delightful glitches.

2023: AI goes from hype to habit

AI isn’t new. The technology dates back to the 1960s, but until recently it was more sci-fi than something you’d actually use at work. We were still nowhere near Tony Stark’s Jarvis, but suddenly AI was good enough to start rewriting how whole industries run.

In mobile marketing, years of manual optimization gave way to algorithms that could automate A/B testing, streamline mediation, improve ad creatives, and power predictive LTV models. On the user side, generative AI chat assistants began appearing in mobile apps, transforming how people search, learn, and create content.

2024: China’s regulatory shifts

For much of the world, 2024 was about steady progress. AI-powered tools became part of daily routines and unlocked automation and growth for businesses.

China had a very different year. New regulations to curb gaming addiction limited minors to 90 minutes of play on weekdays, three hours on weekends and holidays, and capped in-game spending at 400 yuan (about $60) per month. Many publishers shifted their focus toward India, MENA and LATAM.

Appodeal founded Vector, its in-house data startup. The team, soon to grow to 100 people, tested new models in live environments with immediate revenue impact. In adtech, the question was no longer whether to use machine learning but how to make it work.

2025: Mobile revenue hits record high

Today, things are looking incredibly positive for the mobile industry as a whole. Mobile app revenue is projected to reach ~$613B in 2025, up from $36B in 2016.

The Appodeal Accelerator is seeing its first success stories.

“We watched Infinite Minesweeper grow from a side project into a sustainable business with 1 million downloads and counting, and now Jakub Sobuń runs his own studio.”

Vicky Huz,
Client Partnerships, Appodeal Accelerator

“Since 2015, our vision evolved from equipping people to succeed on the app stores to a broader goal: helping every person discover and live their purpose, and using technology to multiply the impact. This is where Appodeal will be looking over the next decade.”

Pavel Golubev,
CEO & Founder of Appodeal