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The cost of acquiring mobile app users dipped for once in December

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

In a surprise, the cost of acquiring loyal mobile app and game users fell in the busy month of December, according to an index tracked by mobile app marketing firm Fiksu.

The cost of acquiring new users has been a curse for mobile app developers, particularly small indie companies that can’t afford to spend a lot on app marketing. The cost has been relentlessly going up. But December offered a rare respite even though the number of daily app downloads rose 12 percent to 6.4 million on the Apple iTunes App Store, compared to 5.7 million in November. From a year ago, the number of daily app downloads was up 20 percent.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.