Estimated Mobile App Growth Challenges in 2025
Better use of customer data with a strong hand on compliance will be the biggest shield against mobile app growth challenges.
App marketing teams have endured enough this year. The experiences in the app landscape have been nothing short of a rollercoaster. With AI taking over, there has been a mix of emotions steamrolling the industry from all sides – from privacy rules evolving with the day to customers having newer demands while adapting to these situations.
App marketers must balance all aspects together to deliver just the right strategy. And the job doesn’t end there, the app marketer must also ensure the ad dollars aren’t fed to fraud and that there’s a measurable return on investments.
As per Branch’s State of Mobile App Marketing 2025 (Southeast Asia), 82% of marketers say the mobile app is one of their business’s primary customer acquisition, engagement, or retention channels. There is a clear indication that companies integrating their apps into their broader growth strategy are better positioned for sustained success.
But as they maneuver through the bumpy road that is app marketing, what are the biggest challenges they must overcome to ensure results?
The Line between Private and Personal
When a customer receives a personalised email, there are two ways for them to react. One, they think the email was written just for them — the brand has reached out at the right time and with the right offer. Two, they are at the receiving end of a message which clearly shows the use of data they don’t remember sharing explicitly.
In the first case, as a brand, you either win a new customer, or witness the beginning of a loyal customer-brand relationship. In the latter, you are permanently stamped in the customer’s brain as a big “NO” for having broken their trust by using their private data without consent.
Marketers struggle to find their way out of this mess—it is either overly intrusive data practices or insufficiently personalised user experiences, both of which can undermine user trust and engagement.
As per the study by Branch, on a scale of 1 to 10, only 33% of respondents rate their satisfaction with privacy and security practices as 6, with 26% at 7, and 41% at 8. This indicates that while there is progress, there is substantial room for improvement.
“There’s a fine line between personalisation and being creepy,” says Taha Iqbal, Group Head Marketing at Almusbah International Trading Company. Iqbal says one of the important things to consider is to not do personalisation just for the sake of it, or only because tools are available.
Ad Fraud: The Revenue Eater
Spending too little is a constant concern, while it is a bigger worry to spend a lot and see no returns on the investment. This is especially true during the holiday season when the excitement is high, but so is the risk of ad fraud. The challenge? Marketers are unable to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent activity.
Ad fraud has disturbing financial implications, but besides budget, the aftermath impacts another key element of the brand-consumer relationship—customer trust. “Imagine a customer clicking on your ad, only to land on a fake website impersonating your brand. Not only is your revenue at risk, but your reputation takes a hit,” says Nasser Oudjidane, CEO and Co-founder at Tapper.
The Branch report identifies combatting ad fraud as a key focus for 51% of surveyed marketers, with these business leaders wanting to add an ad fraud detection tool to their tech stack.
Ad fraud has now evolved from click fraud and ad stacking to advanced methods that utilise AI for tricking the businesses, making detection tougher. Oudjidane suggests four key methods to tackle ad fraud: advanced traffic verification, behavioural monitoring, educating colleagues and customers, and employing machine learning for staying ahead of fraudsters.
“Bot traffic often mimics human actions such as scrolling, hovering, or even adding items to a cart, tricking systems into categorising them as legitimate users. During flash sales and Black Friday rushes, these bots can overwhelm servers, skew data, and exhaust budgets,” adds Oudjidane.
Data Silos Break the Deal
Siloed teams and siloed data lead to disconnected and broken experiences across critical brand-owned destinations, becoming a cause of frustration for everyone involved. Without a comprehensive view, businesses struggle to understand the full impact of their marketing efforts and may fail to address areas needing improvement.
Branch’s analysis reveals that despite the availability of data integration tools, 27% of respondents report difficulty in comparing attribution data across channels.
“Today, the stakes are high for brands to deliver seamless interactions wherever their customers choose to engage with them. Unfortunately, there’s a big problem. Research shows that nearly 3 out of every 4 website visits happen on a mobile device. Yet mobile apps and websites are often treated as siloed channels,” says Steve Tan, VP & General Manager, EMEA/APAC at Airship.
Tan suggests unifying data streams and investing in no-code solutions that allow you to overcome your reliance on developers, so you can go beyond messaging and act with speed and agility.
To get a holistic view of user interactions and campaign performance, marketers must centralise data collection through integrated analytics platforms. Rohit Bushanam Chandrasekar, Product Manager at Saira Solutions, says “Predictive analytics turns historical data and advanced algorithms into foresight, enabling informed decisions that drive growth and enhance efficiency.”
Chandrasekar recommends that data forecasting can improve business strategy by optimising inventory management, enhancing risk management, integrating touchpoints with journey orchestration, and using zero- and first-party data collection across channels.
Privacy Compliance Stands in the Way
Brands are constantly stuck between “trying-to-respect-consumer-privacy” and struggling to “innovate-their-advertising-efforts” without enough data to work with. Unfortunately, while some in the ad space have taken on the opportunity to make advertising better, others are still clinging to user-level tracking. Maor Sadra, Co-Founder and CEO at INCRMNTAL, says that the industry needs to let go of its desire to track everything.
“The truth is that an advertiser or adtech vendor can never truly know what is going on in the consumer’s mind when they view an ad.” Sadra emphasises that the industry needs to acknowledge that privacy legislation has been introduced for a reason. “Brands must accept this and work with vendors that are privacy-safe, otherwise they could find themselves in hot water with the very consumers they are trying to attract.”
Research from Branch, however, shows that the majority of businesses have complied. A staggering 88% of respondents said they are not planning to re-evaluate their mobile customer data and privacy strategy, indicating that most businesses are satisfied with their current strategies.
This assumption could be problematic. The real challenge isn’t just about compliance– it’s about ensuring that businesses can innovate, evolve, and meet new customer demands while staying within regulatory boundaries.
“Unfortunately, we have to live with the reality of lesser data in the future due to privacy concerns, which simply means two steps need to be implemented: data collection and data modelling,” says Nikhil Vidhyan, Regional Head of Digital Omnichannel at Ninja Van Group. AI can be the solution to help stitch the data story so we can derive actionable insights, adds Vidhyan, suggesting that AI can help build efficient hybrid attribution systems, which will work better as we live in a multi-touch world.
App Growth Check List
Scanning the above challenges in app growth, Branch’s State of Mobile App Marketing 2025 (Southeast Asia) suggests the following list of to-dos for businesses to ensure readiness:
- Adopted privacy-first technologies
- Regularly updating privacy practices
- Have an active team/tool combating suspicious fraud
- Monitoring traffic sources
- Fostering cross-department collaboration
- Investing in compliance training
“In an environment where mobile-first strategies are becoming the norm, businesses face the dual challenge of leveraging sophisticated tools to enhance user engagement while ensuring compliance with evolving privacy regulations. The significant reliance on analytics and attribution tools reflects a growing need to make data-driven decisions that can drive success amidst these challenges,” says Vidhur Bhagat, Regional Vice President – APAC at Branch.
The State of Mobile App Marketing 2025 (Southeast Asia) report offers an insider’s view into outlooks, actions, and readiness for mobile app growth success. Read the full report here.
