This is an edited version of the editorial published in last Friday’s newsletter, for paid subscribers only. If you want to read more opinion-led stuff like this every Friday, sign up as a paid subscriber below:
You know one company’s been dominating the headlines when you start running out of logo variants to use. In late 2023 and early 2024 it was Unity; you can probably find six or seven different flavours of that logo in the mobilegamer.biz archives.
In 2025, it’s AppLovin. But for very different reasons. First, it was its earnings and skyrocketing shares. Next, it was that $900m studio sell-off. Then came the short-sellers, making wild claims about AppLovin’s business to make a quick buck.
This week, AppLovin confirmed reports that it is eyeing up a TikTok acquisition, and told the US president himself. A wild ride.
I’ve been speaking to various folks around the mobile business for some time about AppLovin and why it is on this incredible run. Here’s what they said:
The short sellers are wrong. AppLovin is, according to people working closely with the firm, unlikely to actually be bending rules or using nefarious means to collect user data. The truth is actually pretty boring: AppLovin is just really, really good at what it does, and has been getting better and better at it.
The foundations of its current technology were built on all the data it got from its soon-to-be-sold network of studios, which contained a leading title in each genre. As a result, it was ahead of the pack when Apple’s ATT policies came in – and after some turbulence, it had enough data to ride the storm. The company quickly focused on effectively replacing the fingerprinting once possible on iOS with its own tech.
That focus and specialism also put it ahead of other adtech players like Meta and Google, who were – and are – too big, slow and broad to seize the moment.
It helps that IronSource and Unity’s merger has been a complete disaster to date, of course. Without a great deal of competition out there, AppLovin has cemented its UA dominance. Most people we’ve spoken to doing UA at scale pumps the majority of their money into AppLovin, and we’ve heard it outperforms every competitor. In many cases, the other channels are just there for variety and experimentation.
And as its profits kept growing, AppLovin sold its story to Wall Street even more effectively. In its November 7 2024 earnings call, CEO Adam Foroughi’s fun stat about AppLovin earning over $1.5m in profit per employee proved to be really potent shorthand – the stock has been red hot ever since.
It has also been teasing the markets about taking its hyper-effective customer targeting tech into ecommerce, a big reason for investors to be bullish for its future. But like it did with those game studios years ago, it’ll likely need first-hand data from online shopping outlets to build out its models, right? Perhaps it’ll buy a company specialising in online checkout tech or something similar to do just that.
Meanwhile, there’s the short sellers. The idea that a company is simply very good at what it does feels too easy and simple, especially when you’re talking about adtech, where so much goes on within blackboxes and unknowable algorithms.
The three separate short seller reports we’ve seen published in recent weeks cleverly seized upon those mysteries, and those explainer blogs posted by CEO Adam Foroughi and CTO Basil Shikin meant to calm the markets may not have helped clarify things, really. They’re still quite vague to the untrained eye, and there are now a lot of untrained eyes looking at this company.
Now, amazingly, we can add TikTok into the mix. It’s unclear if the US’ attempts to wrestle the platform away from its Chinese owner Bytedance will actually work, but AppLovin makes way more sense as a TikTok buyer than the other rumoured acquirers.
Unlike all of the other entities apparently in contention, AppLovin has years and years of experience – and success! – in creating recommendation algorithms. That’s exactly what you need if you’re going to run TikTok, and it helps that it is also eyeing up ecommerce next, which is where TikTok makes most of its money (in China, at least – it will increasingly do so in the west over time).
So yes, it seems i’ll need to find a couple more variants of that AppLovin logo to use on the website as this latest drama develops.
Six months ago, AppLovin was a quietly dominant adtech firm that rarely generated any headlines; today, with short sellers, Trump and TikTok in the mix, the firm has been thrust into the spotlight like never before. And it looks like it’ll stay there.
