MAU 2025 Recap: Exploring Today’s Mobile Moment

The mobile industry today is at another inflection point. Mobile behavior continues to evolve—and fast. At MAU 2025, Beth Berger, Moloco’s VP & GM for Moloco Ads in the Americas, led a keynote session to unpack the major shifts redefining the current mobile landscape. Beth shared revealing data and trends shaping today’s mobile moment.

What follows is a TL;DR summary of the story Beth shared at MAU 2025 on today’s mobile moment.

From the first smartphone to today’s mobile moment

Over the past two decades, the evolution of the mobile industry has spanned five key eras:

1. The dawn of the mobile browsing era (2007-2011) - Smartphones redefined convenience, but early mobile browsing was slow and limited. Social apps like Facebook and Twitter (now X) were just getting started.
2. The app explosion and platform consolidation era (2012-2016) - App stores matured, and platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat dominated user attention.
3. The personalization era (2016-2020) - The big social platforms’ algorithms and first-party data powered hyper-personalized feeds, concentrating time spent on mobile to their platforms.
4. The privacy reckoning era (2021-2024) - Privacy changes shifted the balance of power among ecosystem players and altered user behavior. Users grew more selective about their app usage, and niche and utility-based apps gained relevance.
5. The fragmentation era (2024-2025) - Today, mobile app usage is fragmented. Users now split their time across a wide range of specialized and community-driven apps, signaling a shift to more purposeful, multifaceted mobile behavior.

“Which brings us to today’s mobile moment. The data points to a big trend with big implications: fragmentation. While people, of course, still spend time on the big platforms, they’re increasingly exploring community-based and specialized apps.”

User attention on mobile is fragmented

Today’s mobile attention is fragmented. Only 32% of time in-app is spent on Meta and Google platforms, based on our analysis. While almost half of the other time is spent distributed across 3 million apps, from Duolingo and ESPN to MyFitnessPal and BeReal. These apps are all a part of what we call the independent app ecosystem.

The independent app ecosystem opportunity

We ran an analysis and found that marketers can reach two billion daily active users globally on the independent app ecosystem, matching the combined audience reach of TikTok and Instagram. Yet many marketers still struggle to measure incrementality or align their teams around the impact of this shift in user attention. The opportunity is massive, but it requires new thinking and updated strategies.

Validating the opportunity

In collaboration with Singular, we analyzed the impact of diversifying ad spend on the independent app ecosystem. The findings were fascinating: Advertisers who added independent platforms to their predominantly social media mix saw meaningful returns.

Day 30 ROAS increased by:

• 48% for all app advertisers
• 116% for consumer app advertisers in finance, on-demand, education, entertainment, health & fitness, shopping, and travel
• 214% for shopping app advertisers

“The takeaway from the data that surprised us all is not that the lift is there, but how large it is. We learned that advertisers who embrace the full spectrum of the mobile opportunity are winning big in this new landscape.”

Navigating today’s mobile moment through AI

Despite the definitive ROI, the challenges presented by today’s mobile moment should feel familiar to mobile marketers. It’s the same challenge Google and Meta had as they scaled their ad businesses, which they solved by using AI to match the right advertiser with the right user in the right context, at scale. Now, marketers can make use of the same AI-driven technology, just within different contexts, to succeed in today’s mobile moment.

A final thought

To all mobile marketers reading this: You most likely understand mobile better than anyone at your company. So use that data to educate your organization about the new mobile moment.

Ready to add independent platforms to your media mix today? Reach out to our team to get started.