Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework, which required explicit user permission for cross-app tracking, reduced mobile advertising effectiveness in ways the industry understood theoretically in 2021 and has spent the subsequent years quantifying empirically. The quantification has not been favorable. CPMs for iOS advertising inventory dropped significantly in the period following ATT’s rollout. Attribution accuracy — the ability to connect an ad impression to a downstream app install or purchase — declined materially. The precision-targeted mobile advertising ecosystem that had been the dominant growth channel for consumer apps was not destroyed, but it was substantially impaired.

The subscription model’s dominance of mobile app monetization was, until recently, treated as a settled question. One-time purchases were dead. Advertising was privacy-constrained and algorithmically contested. Subscriptions provided predictable revenue, lower upfront friction, and the renewal economics that made customer lifetime value calculations favorable. Every growth deck from 2018 to 2022 told the same story about subscriptions being the obvious answer.

The reckoning that followed was predictable to anyone paying attention to the demand side of that story. Users had subscribed to enough things. The subscription fatigue that entertainment services experienced — as the number of streaming subscriptions a household maintained reached and exceeded what they were willing to pay — extended to software. Productivity apps, fitness apps, photo editors, and note-taking tools all compete for a monthly budget that users have become conscious of in ways they were not during the subscription model’s initial adoption phase.