Beyond Downloads: What Sustainable App Growth Looks Like
Downloads are no longer enough to measure app growth. Youssef Farkash, RVP, EMEA, Branch, explains why retention, attribution and long-term customer value matter more.
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App downloads remain one of the most visible numbers in mobile marketing. They are easy to track, easy to report and often easy to celebrate.
But an install says little about what happens next.
Users may open an app once and disappear, uninstall within weeks, or never reach the point where the product demonstrates its value. For subscription businesses, the gap between an install, a trial, a paying subscriber and a retained customer can be even more significant.
At the same time, the path to an app is becoming harder to trace. A consumer might discover a brand through an AI assistant, search on Google, compare products in an app store and complete the purchase on a mobile device days later. Each transition creates another potential break in attribution.
For European marketers, the picture is further complicated by the Digital Markets Act, changing app-store economics, privacy requirements and the emergence of alternative distribution channels. Growth is therefore becoming less about generating another install and more about understanding what that install is ultimately worth.
Youssef Farkash, RVP, EMEA at Branch, sees the distinction between short-term acquisition and sustainable growth in what happens across the entire customer journey. The focus is shifting towards connecting acquisition with retention, understanding the value of individual campaigns and ensuring the experience remains consistent from the first click through to conversion.
In this interview, Farkash discusses why downloads have become an incomplete measure of growth, where AI-driven discovery is creating new attribution gaps, how the Digital Markets Act is affecting European app strategies, and why alternative app stores represent different opportunities across Android and iOS.
Excerpts from the interview;
Are app downloads still a meaningful measure of growth in 2026, or have marketers simply become too comfortable optimising for a metric that says little about business value? Explain
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this lately, actually. Honestly? Downloads stopped being the story a while ago, but I still see them leading the first slide of almost every deck I sit in on.
It’s the easiest number to point to, but it’s also just the first step. Around half of apps are uninstalled within 30 days, so the point of interest is whether or not an app is providing value, not if it’s being downloaded.
What I push our customers to look at instead is if people come back, if they get to the moment where the product proves its value, and if they convert from a trial into a paying subscriber and then actually renew.
That’s the stronger growth story and the one investors and CFOs actually care about, especially with subscription models where an install isn’t a “subscriber” and a subscriber isn’t a “retained user.”
Marketers who are still reporting up on downloads and MAUs alone aren’t lying; they’re just measuring the easy thing instead of the more important thing.
With customer journeys becoming increasingly fragmented across search, social, web, app stores, and AI-driven discovery, where are marketers losing visibility into the path from discovery to conversion?
This is probably the one I talk about most with EMEA marketing leads right now.
A customer journey now might involve someone seeing a brand come up in a ChatGPT answer, searching on Google, skimming an AI overview, comparing options on the App Store, then finally converting on their mobile phone days later, even if they started on a laptop.
Every one of those handoffs is a place where attribution can break.
The blind spot I’d flag specifically is AI-driven discovery. When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini surface a link, and someone clicks through, that traffic very often shows up in analytics as “direct” or unattributed with no channel and no context. So marketers are already flying blind on a source of traffic that’s growing fast.
The second big gap is web-to-app: someone starts on your mobile site and ends up in the app later, and unless those two experiences are stitched together, you either double-count them or lose them entirely.
We built AI-driven discovery attribution specifically because customers kept telling us traffic was showing up from nowhere, and they couldn’t prove whether it was working or wasted spend.
Europe has its own regulatory and ecosystem dynamics, from the DMA to changes around alternative app stores and privacy. How are these shifts changing the way brands approach app acquisition and engagement?
The DMA forced real change, and what’s interesting is the economics Apple built in — a Core Technology Fee of roughly €0.50 per install after the first million means most brands that looked seriously at the alternative-app-store route have quietly decided it’s not worth it yet.
It only really pencils out if you’ve got Spotify-level scale and a subscription model with very high retention, because you need a lot of revenue per install to offset that fee. What I’m seeing brands actually do differently in Europe isn’t a mass exit from the App Store.
It’s much more about compliance-readiness: consent flows, DMA parameters, being able to prove where a user genuinely came from under stricter privacy rules, and testing alternative distribution carefully rather than betting the business on it.
Branch has visibility into the customer journey across multiple touchpoints. What are you seeing among European brands that separates short-term app growth from growth that actually compounds?
The brands I’d point to — and we work with companies like Puma, Funstage, and Just Eat Takeaway.com across Europe — the pattern is pretty consistent. The ones getting short-term lifts are usually optimising a single channel or a single campaign in isolation: a strong UA push here, a clever influencer moment there.
For a quarter, that works.
The ones that compound are treating acquisition and retention as the same problem. They know which specific campaign (not just which channel) produced the subscriber who’s still paying six months later, versus the campaign that produced a cheap install that churned after a week.
And they’re a little obsessive (in a good way) about the handoff moments; their users aren’t landing on a generic home screen instead of exactly what they clicked for. La Redoute, for example, saw a real lift in 30-day retention just from fixing that continuity with deep linking.
That’s the difference — short-term growth chases the click, compounding growth chases what the click was actually worth six months later.
Alternative app stores are gaining attention in Europe. Do you expect them to become a meaningful growth channel for brands, or is their potential being overstated?
I’d call myself cautiously optimistic, not evangelical, about this one. On Android, alternative stores — Samsung’s Galaxy Store, Huawei’s AppGallery, Xiaomi’s GetApps — are already meaningfully used in specific markets, and we’ve built deterministic attribution support for those OEM stores because customers were asking for it.
So on Android, I think it’s real, and it’s growing, and brands ignoring it are leaving users on the table, especially in markets where Huawei has real share.
On iOS, I’m more sceptical it goes mainstream soon, mostly because of the economics I mentioned earlier — that Core Technology Fee makes third-party iOS app stores a rounding-error decision for most brands, only worth it at serious scale.
So my honest read is the potential is real, but it’s currently overstated as a blanket European trend and understated as a targeted Android opportunity. It depends enormously on which market and which platform you’re talking about — which is very on-brand for how fragmented EMEA is generally.
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