Bright spot of UA budget growth in Vietnam
AppsFlyer, the Modern Marketing Cloud platform, analyzed 30 billion installs from nearly 12,000 applications in the fields of finance, shopping, entertainment and games in the period from Q3 of 2024 to Q2 of 2026, showing that the application economy in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) is growing, with 6.7 billion USD spent on user attraction and remarketing.
However, the market is becoming increasingly difficult to assess, and a single growth index no longer fully reflects the market picture.
In that context, Vietnam is showing strong growth in user-attracting investment (UA) in the fields of entertainment, finance and games.
In the entertainment sector, UA spending on entertainment applications in Vietnam on the Android operating system increased sharply by 194%, more than 7 times higher than the average increase of 23% in the entire Southeast Asian region.
The financial and budgetary sector attracting users of financial applications in Vietnam increased by 153% on Android, reflecting the fierce race to dominate the market share of digital banking, e-wallets and payment intermediaries.
Meanwhile, in the game sector, although the number of game installations on the Android platform across APAC decreased from 17% to 26%, Vietnam still witnessed an impressive UA spending growth of 106%.
The problem of keeping users
In Vietnam as well as many other markets in APAC, although businesses are stepping up investment to attract new users, retaining users in the long term is becoming a more difficult problem.
In Southeast Asia, the percentage of users of financial applications still active after 7 days increased by 45% compared to the same period, but after 30 days decreased by 32%.
This trend not only appears in the financial sector but is also recorded in entertainment and shopping, across all regions and both platforms. Meanwhile, the initial level of interaction of the game is relatively stable, but the percentage of users who continue to operate after 30 days still decreases according to the general trend.
Data-based strategy for Vietnamese and APAC businesses
AppsFlyer's report emphasizes that installments and earning ability are increasingly separate. For example, in the Game segment, although the number of installments decreased, the percentage of users willing to pay fees increased.
In addition, the fraud rate generally tends to decrease sharply in Southeast Asia (down 90% in the iOS Shopping segment and 80% in the Finance segment), opening up a safer investment environment for marketers.
Commenting on this trend, Mr. Ronen Mense, President and CEO of AppsFlyer APAC region, said: "A market with a decrease in installments but increased paid users will need a completely different strategy from a market with increased installments but users not staying long. Businesses need to make decisions based on the overall picture instead of just looking at the surface numbers.
