Pixalate’s January 2024 Mobile App Spoofing Report For Apple App Store: Subway Surfers, Kika Keyboard, Sudoku.com Among Top Apps Affected by Spoofing

LONDON, March 12, 2023 -- Pixalate, the market-leading fraud protection, privacy, and compliance analytics platform for Connected TV (CTV) and Mobile Advertising, today released the January 2024 Mobile App Spoofing Report: Apple App Store.

This report covers Mobile App Spoofing numbers in January 2024 on apps found in the Apple App Store. For background information, methodology and definitions related to Mobile App Spoofing, please visit our inaugural Mobile App Spoofing Report and view the FAQs there.

The following are the top 5 mobile apps by global region - North America, APAC, EMEA, LATAM - from the Apple App Store that were most impacted by app spoofing:

Download the full list of Apple App Store Mobile apps targeted by app spoofing in January 2024:

Pixalate’s App Spoofing reports for other platforms:

• Apple App Store
• Google Play Store
• Roku Channel Store
• Amazon Fire TV App Store
• Samsung Smart TV App store
• Apple TV App Store
  
  

Methodology

To compile this research, Pixalate’s data science team took the following steps:

1. Identify “Highly Impacted” mobile apps: On each respective platform within each respective region, Pixalate identified apps with the highest rate of spoofed traffic (e.g. the percentage of all traffic purporting to come from the app that does not actually come from the app). In the context of this research, “Highly Impacted” apps are apps that have an app spoofing rate greater than 90% of other apps on a given platform in a given region (or 5%, whichever is lower) and pass an impression volume threshold.
2. The “Highly Impacted” apps are then ranked by volume of spoofed impressions.
   
   

About Pixalate

Pixalate is a global platform for privacy compliance, ad fraud prevention, and data intelligence in the digital ad supply chain. Founded in 2012, Pixalate’s platform is trusted by regulators, data researchers, advertisers, publishers, ad tech platforms, and financial analysts across the Connected TV (CTV), mobile app, and website ecosystems. Pixalate is MRC-accredited for the detection and filtration of Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT). www.pixalate.com 

Disclaimer

The content of this post, and the App Spoofing Report (the “Report”), reflect Pixalate’s opinions with respect to the factors that Pixalate believes can be useful to the digital media industry. Pixalate’s opinions are just that, opinions, which means that they are neither facts nor guarantees; and neither this press release nor the Report are intended to impugn the standing or reputation of any entity, person or app, but instead, to report findings and apparent trends in the time period studied. Per the MRC, “'Fraud' is not intended to represent fraud as defined in various laws, statutes and ordinances or as conventionally used in U.S. Court or other legal proceedings, but rather a custom definition strictly for advertising measurement purposes. Also per the MRC, “‘Invalid Traffic’ is defined generally as traffic that does not meet certain ad serving quality or completeness criteria, or otherwise does not represent legitimate ad traffic that should be included in measurement counts. Among the reasons why ad traffic may be deemed invalid is it is a result of non-human traffic (spiders, bots, etc.), or activity designed to produce fraudulent traffic.”