Mid-year check: the 2026 acquisition outlook, six months on
Four themes framed our January outlook. Six months on, three held, one moved faster than expected, and one buyer habit still has not caught up.
Four themes framed UA Ledger's January outlook: a shift from install volume to lifetime value; ad network consolidation; platform legal risk; and web shops moving from hedge to channel. Six months in, three have held roughly on schedule. One moved faster than most buyers planned for.
This mid-year outlook: LTV over volume, confirmed twice
Sensor Tower's State of Mobile in January put 2025 gaming IAP revenue at about 82 billion dollars, up 1.3% year on year, against softening downloads. Its State of Gaming report in late February, now covering console and PC alongside mobile, repeated the pattern: 52 billion game downloads in 2025, mobile IAP roughly flat, installs down about 7%. Both reports pointed the same way. The strategy shift is toward retention and monetisation rather than new-user counts, and AppsFlyer's numbers from mid January added texture rather than contradiction: paid install share up 10% year on year even as overall volume cooled, which reads as budget concentrating on users worth keeping rather than spreading thinner across more of them.
Consolidation ran ahead of the calendar
This is the theme that moved fastest. In January, the open question was whether Unity's Grow business could keep growing against AppLovin's momentum. By February 11, the answer looked stark: AppLovin's fourth quarter revenue was up 66% year on year to 1.66 billion dollars, while Unity's stock fell more than 25% on a soft first-quarter guide. By late March, Unity had gone further than reweighting internally. It announced the ironSource Ads network would shut entirely on April 30, and confirmed that shutdown in its first-quarter results in May. A buyer reading January's outlook and expecting a slow drift of budget toward Unity Vector instead got a hard deadline and a full network wind-down inside four months. Liftoff's path added a second consolidation story: an IPO withdrawn in February amid a broader tech sell-off, then refiled in April and priced on June 3 and 4 at 23 dollars a share, raising 437 million dollars, with shares trading above 30 dollars on debut. AppsFlyer, the MMP that spent January fielding a roughly 2 billion dollar private-equity approach, instead closed a Series E above 1 billion dollars in June. Google and Meta joined Unity and Moloco as minority investors. Read against January's framing, that is a different kind of consolidation than a buyout, strategic capital rather than an acquirer, but it is still fewer independent hands on the measurement layer.
Platform risk stayed a slow burn
Epic v Google's January hearing surfaced an 800 million dollar side partnership that Judge Donato flagged as a possible quid pro quo, and by April he was scheduling a summer evidentiary hearing rather than approving the settlement outright. Epic v Apple moved on a separate track: the Ninth Circuit sent the case back to Judge Gonzalez Rogers on April 28 to determine what fees Apple can charge on external payment links, and the Supreme Court agreed on June 30 to hear Apple's appeal, though on a narrow procedural question about the contempt finding rather than the underlying fee dispute. Neither case has produced the operational shock that the ironSource shutdown did. Buyers who budgeted for court-driven change in the first half mostly budgeted for nothing happening yet, and that held.
Web shops are still a plan, not a line item
This is the theme where the gap between outlook and practice is widest. Apple's EU fee changes took effect January 1 as expected, and the arithmetic behind steering to a web shop got easier to model. But six months on, the anecdotal pattern across mid-size teams is a web shop treated as a project for next quarter rather than a channel with its own creative brief and attribution setup. The tools exist. The habit doesn't yet.
