AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular: a buyer's comparison

Every MMP evaluation eventually reduces to the same conversation: three vendors, all of whom will demo well, all of whom will produce a reference customer who loves them, and a buyer who has to pick one anyway. AppsFlyer and Adjust, along with Singular, remain the names most mobile game studios shortlist, and the differences that actually matter sit below the demo layer. This isn't a verdict on which wins. It's the set of questions worth asking each vendor directly before signing.

Attribution coverage: SKAN, AAK and Android

All three claim full SKAdNetwork 4 and AdAttributionKit support, and at a baseline level the claim is true for all three. The differences show up in the tooling built around the raw postback: how each vendor's conversion-value decoder handles crowd-anonymisation thresholds, how clearly each surfaces which of your postbacks it suppressed for low volume, and how each recommends structuring a fine-versus-coarse value schema for a specific genre. Ask for a live dashboard walk-through on one of your own recent campaigns, not a canned demo account. Suppressed-postback handling is exactly the kind of detail that looks identical in marketing copy and isn't.

Android measurement has quietly become the harder half of this comparison.

With Google's Privacy Sandbox largely retired for Chrome by early 2026 and GAID access narrowing, each MMP has built its own blend of device-level signal where it remains available and modelled attribution where it doesn't. Ask specifically how each vendor validated its Android modelling, what confidence interval they put around modelled installs, and whether your own analytics team can audit that modelling or whether it's fully opaque. A vendor who can't explain their Android modelling methodology in plain language on a call isn't a vendor whose numbers you should present to finance without a caveat.

Cost aggregation and reporting completeness

Cost-per-install and ROAS figures are only as good as the ad spend data feeding them, and this is where MMPs differ more than their SKAN claims suggest. Check how each vendor handles networks that report cost with a lag, how gaps get flagged rather than silently interpolated, and whether currency conversion timing matches your finance team's own close process. Then ask for a worked example. What happens when a network's cost API goes down for three days? That failure mode is common, and the difference between a vendor that flags the gap clearly and one that quietly shows a misleadingly low CPI is the difference between a trustworthy dashboard and a dangerous one.

Fraud detection and pricing terms

All three bundle fraud protection, and all three will show you a rejection-rate chart in the demo. The useful question is what the rejection actually screens for. Click flooding and click injection are table stakes across all three, but SDK spoofing detection and device farm fingerprinting vary in depth, and so does post-attribution behavioural anomaly scoring. Ask each vendor for their false-positive rate methodology, since a vendor that rejects aggressively without a stated false-positive check may be quietly cutting legitimate installs from a genuinely good network alongside the fraudulent ones.

Pricing across all three has moved toward measured-install or MAU-tiered structures rather than flat platform fees, but the specifics of what counts as a billable event, and what happens to your historical data if you leave, differ enough to matter. Confirm in writing what data exports you retain post-contract, whether raw postback-level data or only aggregated reports, and what the migration path looks like if you need to move a live game's history to a different vendor later. A cheap headline rate with restrictive export terms is a worse deal than it looks at signature time.

How to actually run the RFP

Score each vendor against your own campaign data, not a canned dataset, and insist on a working proof-of-concept against one live game before committing a portfolio. The three vendors are closer in raw capability than their sales decks suggest. That means the deciding factor is usually less about who has the better SKAN decoder and more about which team answers the awkward questions, about Android modelling, about cost gaps, about fraud false positives, straightforwardly rather than with a slide.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• The MMP RFP Checklist to Run Before You Switch Vendors
• AppsFlyer at $2B: what a private-equity MMP would mean for buyers