Finance app installs drop 17% in APAC: AppsFlyer report

AppsFlyer, a mobile measurement and attribution firm, released an Asia-Pacific finance marketing report that says finance app installs fell 17% year-on-year in 2025 as marketers cut acquisition spend and shifted budgets to retention.

The report also puts user acquisition spend down 27% across Asia-Pacific, while remarketing spend in Southeast Asia surged 193%, signaling a stronger focus on re-engaging existing users.

AppsFlyer’s data shows uneven markets, with Thailand installs down 40% and Pakistan up 61%, while Indonesia generated 39% of Asia-Pacific Android in-app revenue.

AppsFlyer said fraud rates dropped to 22% from 41%, based on aggregated data covering 5.3 billion installs and US$5.7 billion in user acquisition spend in 2025.

🔗 Source: AppsFlyer

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Asia-Pacific’s finance app market shifts from rapid growth to keeping customers

Competition keeps climbing, with more than 66,000 financial technology (fintech) start-ups in Asia and an expected 100 new banking challengers, typically digital-first banks trying to win customers from incumbents, launching in 2025 1.
That crowding follows a huge download wave, since finance apps in Asia-Pacific logged 2.7 billion installations between Q1 2019 and Q1 2021 2.
As growth cools, finance app publishers and their marketing teams put more effort into better onboarding and lower churn (customer drop-off) to hold on to existing customers 3.
Fraud still weighs on results, even with fraudulent installations falling from 41% to 22% after sitting near 40% in India and the Southeast Asia (SEA) region in 2021 2.

The finance app slowdown sketches tech’s next stage of global growth

Across the app industry, companies cut back on aggressive acquisition spend and lean into retention while they test where unit economics, the profit and cost dynamics per customer, make sense before scaling 4.
Country results diverge, with Thailand declining while Pakistan grows, so app marketers adjust plans to match wide gaps in subscription lifetime value (LTV, or total revenue expected from a customer over time) across Asia-Pacific 4.
Pricing and payback vary sharply, since Japan’s median LTV is $23.4 while India’s pricing index runs at 0.6x the US baseline 4.
This messier reality boosts demand for mobile measurement, since marketers rely on attribution platforms like AppsFlyer, which connects advertising spend to installs and in-app outcomes, to track ROI from retention campaigns under tighter privacy regulations 5.