OEM and preload channels on Android

Preload deals rarely show up in a Western UA team's channel mix review. They still move a meaningful volume of Android installs in the markets where device manufacturers, not app stores, control most of the discovery surface a new phone owner ever sees.

Where the volume actually is

Samsung ships Galaxy Store on its handsets. Xiaomi ships GetApps, and Huawei ships AppGallery, which runs without Google Play access in China and in reduced form elsewhere; each of them works as the default discovery layer on the devices it arrives on. A user who buys a Samsung phone in India meets that store as a pre-installed default, not as a choice made after shopping around for an alternative to Google Play, and the same holds for a Xiaomi buyer in Southeast Asia.

Digital Turbine runs a related but distinct model. Its device-level placement business arranges for an app to appear pre-loaded, or as a first-open recommendation, on carrier or OEM-provisioned devices at the point of activation, before the user has installed anything at all. The commercial logic is identical either way: a manufacturer or carrier monetises the attention of a brand-new device owner, and a studio pays for placement in front of an audience it could not otherwise reach through a conventional ad auction.

The quality profile is genuinely different

Users acquired through a preload or OEM placement did not choose the app the way a paid install user chooses to tap an ad. Some meaningful share never open it at all, having received it as a default rather than sought it out, and the retention curve for a preload cohort typically starts lower than a comparably priced paid UA cohort before flattening out among the users who do engage.

That's no reason to dismiss the channel. It is a reason to model it separately from paid media in a UA report, because blending preload cohorts into a studio's overall retention or LTV numbers without a label distorts both the preload channel's apparent performance and the studio's read on its paid channels, since the two cohorts respond to completely different acquisition mechanics.

Negotiating a preload deal

Preload and OEM placement deals are negotiated relationships rather than self-serve auctions, closer in structure to a media partnership than to a programmatic buy. Pricing usually runs on a cost-per-install or cost-per-active-user basis agreed directly with the manufacturer or carrier, or with an intermediary like Digital Turbine; UA Ledger covered the mechanics of that business model in its look at Digital Turbine's on-device preload channel. Terms move on volume commitments, on placement prominence, on exclusivity within a genre or category on a given device line.

A studio entering this space for the first time should expect a longer sales cycle than opening a Meta ad account. It should also ask, specifically, about active-user definitions in any cost-per-active-user contract, since a loosely defined activation event can inflate the apparent value of a deal that is really delivering shallow, low-intent installs.

The terms worth the most scrutiny govern exclusivity and category carve-outs. A manufacturer offering prominent placement in exchange for a category exclusivity commitment is asking for something with real opportunity cost, since it forecloses a competing genre or title from the same placement for the length of the deal. Worth making for a studio with a strong, differentiated title in a category the manufacturer's audience clearly wants. Poor for a studio whose game is a close substitute for whatever else might have filled that slot.

Reporting cadence is another point to negotiate explicitly rather than accept at a manufacturer's default setting. Preload partners vary widely in how quickly and how granularly they report activation and retention data back to a studio, and a deal with weak reporting terms leaves a buyer unable to tell whether a placement is working until months of spend have already gone out the door. Studios with experience here treat reporting frequency and granularity as a negotiating point on par with price, not as an administrative detail to sort out after everyone has signed.

The region skew that shapes the whole channel

Preload volume concentrates heavily in India and Southeast Asia, plus the Middle East and North Africa. Android device diversity runs high in those markets, first-time smartphone ownership is still a meaningful share of new activations, and manufacturers outside the dominant Western brands hold real market share. A studio building its UA plan primarily around North American or European markets will find little preload volume worth the negotiation effort. Build toward the other regions and the picture inverts: preload and OEM channels sit alongside paid social as a source of scale, and in some markets ahead of it.

Related archive reading

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

• Digital Turbine's On-Device Preload UA Channel in 2025
• India: acquisition in a low-ARPU, high-volume market