Where Are the Next Growth Opportunities for Apps?

For years, the mobile growth playbook was straightforward: buy installs, optimize CPI, fight for ranking in the App Store and Google Play. It worked, until the paid media auction got so competitive that acquisition cost started outpacing the LTV of the users you were acquiring.

Meanwhile, a new touchpoint has been quietly forming, mostly outside the radar of growth teams: the device itself, before a user ever opens an app store.

The App Store Isn’t the First Screen Anymore

Think about the first few minutes with a new smartphone: initial setup, pre-loaded recommendations, manufacturer-curated app folders, the first system notifications. All of that is media, and until recently, it was media no brand could buy in a structured way.

That’s the logic behind OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) advertising: instead of competing for attention after a user has already decided what to install, brands show up during device setup, through pre-installs, native placements, app store recommendations, and branded folders distributed by manufacturers like Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO, and Vivo.

This channel already reaches over 1.5 billion active users globally. It isn’t a niche play. It’s a discovery layer operating in parallel to traditional paid media — one most advertisers haven’t yet mapped into their mix.

What Actually Changes When the Touchpoint Moves to the Device

Three things shift once the entry point stops being the app store and becomes the device itself:

1. Intent timing. The user isn’t comparing your app against five competing tabs — they’re setting up their phone. The decision barrier is lower, and that directly affects install CPI and conversion rate.

2. Pricing stays performance-based. CPI, CPA, or hybrid models — the channel being new doesn’t mean the media risk goes up. What changes is where the campaign shows up, not how it’s billed.

3. Tracking and fraud prevention need to be native to the channel, not retrofitted from another context. Pre-installs, system notifications, and lock screens behave differently in attribution terms than a campaign running inside a third-party app — which demands a measurement layer actually built for this environment.

That last point, in fact, is where most mobile advertising strategies stumble when they try to simply port a traditional UA campaign into the OEM ecosystem.

This Is Just the Surface of the Map

What we’ve outlined here is the entry point to a much wider ecosystem — including formats like keyboard placements (with over 100 daily user interactions), native video and rich media, and the different ways each manufacturer distributes inventory.

We mapped this entire ecosystem, formats, pricing models, tracking logic, and the decision points every mobile-first brand needs to evaluate before allocating budget here, in our new free resource:

“The Guide to the New Mobile Discovery Layer”

If your brand depends on mobile install and activation to grow, this guide gives you visibility into a channel already moving billions of users — one still missing from most media plans today.

No cost. No complicated signup. Just the map your next mobile planning cycle was missing.