Adjust Mobile App Trends 2026 still mixes top-5,000 apps with all tracked apps

Adjust’s Mobile App Trends: 2026 edition still builds figures from a mix of the top 5,000 apps and the total dataset of all apps Adjust tracks, spanning gaming, e-commerce and finance. Gaming cuts such as $0.56 CPI (+30%) or 27% day-1 retention inherit that dual population. Report PDF methodology.

All-apps versus games, again—plus the top-5,000 mix

Prior cards already warn against treating cross-vertical install growth as gaming-only. The 2026 methodology page makes a second mixing risk explicit: some views draw on the top 5,000 while others use the full tracked set, across ~45-country and ~250-territory sources. A studio comparing itself to “the Adjust gaming number” must ask which slice and which vertical label were used.

Casual session growth and other genre cuts remain vendor-sample engagement metrics, not profitability laws.

Keep the population card on the slide

Our recommendation is to paste Adjust’s dataset sentence next to any 2026 benchmark you reuse. If the slide cannot say whether a cell is top-5,000, all-apps or gaming-only, mark the population unknown.

Inspect the evidence

Download the source-population and comparability card. The extraction separates documented facts from our analysis and unknowns.

Further reading: existing authority cards benchmark-check-adjust-all-apps-versus-games and benchmark-check-adjust-casual-session-growth. This card adds the 2026 dual-dataset methodology point rather than repeating those metric extracts.