India: acquisition in a low-ARPU, high-volume market

Android first, by a wide margin

India remains the clearest Android-first market of scale in mobile gaming, and that single fact reshapes almost every UA decision a studio makes there. iOS discipline built around SKAN and conversion value schemas, and around privacy-constrained signal loss generally, matters less to an India-first campaign, because the volume, and often the real revenue, sits on Android where measurement is comparatively unconstrained. A studio importing an iOS-first measurement stack and applying it unchanged to an India campaign is solving for a smaller and less representative slice of the actual market.

That Android skew also means device fragmentation is a live UA problem rather than a historical one. A meaningful share of the install base still runs on lower-memory, lower-processor devices than a Western or East Asian install base does. Creative that assumes console-adjacent visual fidelity will underperform there; so will a build that assumes fast load times on a strong connection. The creative that wins treats a light install size and a fast first-session load as design constraints from the start.

What UPI changes about monetisation, and what it does not

The rise of UPI, India's real-time payments rail, has made in-app purchase friction considerably lower than it was even a few years ago, and studios sometimes read that as a signal to shift acquisition strategy toward IAP-led monetisation, the way a Western or Japanese studio might. It isn't one. In practice, ad monetisation still carries most of the market's revenue relative to in-app purchase, and a UA plan built primarily around IAP payback in India is usually building against a smaller and thinner revenue base than the ad-monetisation alternative offers. UPI has made the purchases that do happen easier and more frequent, which is a real shift and a useful one, but it hasn't made India an IAP-first market in the way some Western operators assume from outside.

Real-money gaming sits in a separate regulatory category entirely and doesn't belong in the same conversation as mobile games UA more broadly. States have taken varying positions on real-money formats over recent years, and a studio operating anywhere near that category needs region-specific legal review before building a UA plan, not a generic mobile games playbook. For the much larger population of free-to-play, ad-monetised titles that aren't real-money formats, that regulatory pressure is mostly a reputational and platform-policy backdrop rather than a direct constraint. Know which category a given title actually sits in before assuming either way.

Reading CPI and retention correctly

CPI in India remains low relative to most other large markets by a wide margin, often a fraction of what the same install costs in the US or the UK or Japan. That low CPI is genuinely attractive. Teams new to the market frequently misread it, though, as a low cost of acquiring value rather than a low cost of acquiring an install. Retention curves in India, particularly for titles that assume Western play session patterns or Western data allowances, tend to be shallower than a studio's home-market baseline predicts, and a plan that budgets India CPI against a home-market retention assumption will systematically overstate the payback the market can deliver.

The studios doing this well budget India separately rather than blending it into a global average, using retention data specific to the market's device and network conditions rather than assuming a global curve applies. Sensor Tower's State of Mobile report, published earlier this year, noted downloads softening even as spend held up, a pattern visible in India too and one that argues for treating install volume as a weaker proxy for market health than it once was.

Where budgets actually work

The clearest opportunity in India UA sits with titles built for the market's actual conditions from the start: a light install size and ad-monetisation-first economics, with creative that performs on a mid-range device over a variable connection, rather than titles built for a Western market and localised into India as an afterthought. A studio treating India as a volume play on top of an existing global build gets the volume. A studio treating it as a distinct market with its own device profile, its own payment profile and its own retention profile tends to get the volume and the payback.

That distinction shows up most clearly in how a team sets its cohort expectations before spend even starts. A retention curve borrowed from a UK or US launch and applied to an India budget will consistently overstate week four and week twelve value, and the gap tends to widen precisely where the CPI looks most attractive, since the cheapest inventory is often the inventory with the shallowest retention behind it. Budgeting India off its own cohort history, even a smaller one built from a limited early test, gives a far more honest read of what the low CPI is actually worth than assuming it behaves like a discounted version of a home market curve.

Related archive reading

• OEM and preload channels on Android
• Japan: what Western studios miss