Two Signals from the Global App Market

Alarmy's Standing Discovered at MAU Vegas 2026

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Over 10,000 mobile industry leaders gathered from six continents. Our company was selected for three speaking sessions, and we navigated the event floor for five days and four nights. From morning running groups to all-day sessions, networking, and evening and nighttime parties. Average sleep time was about four hours; (partly thanks to jet lag). Even while struggling with the time difference, it was such a dense, fulfilling experience that sacrificing a bit of sleep was totally worth it.

I heard multiple times that even more people gathered this year compared to last. It made sense; after attending, I got the strong impression that this conference wasn't just a simple mobile growth event, but rather the place that most accurately shows the current coordinates of the app industry.

I'll organize the thoughts and observations from what I saw and heard over the five days into four main branches.

a. High Concentration of Participating Founders

Usually, when you go to these growth conferences, the majority are people with clear vested interests like sales, BD, or partnership managers. Since it's a place focused on achieving individual business goals, conversations naturally start with the underlying suspicion of "What is this person trying to sell me?", making balanced dialogue difficult.

However, this time was quite different. The proportion of co-founders and founders was overwhelming. Thanks to that, we could start initial conversations with a foundation of trust, enabling fairly deep discussions across product, marketing, and business as a whole. Because they had a balanced sense of ownership, they were interested not just in revenue but also in retention and acquisition, and there was a sense that we could find win-win intersections at any point. I think it might have been the least sales-driven environment out of all the growth conferences ever.

1st Generation Gurus Gather in One Place

What best demonstrated that density of founders was the fact that the 1st generation gurus of mobile apps were still here. These are the founders who launched right around 2010-2011 when apps first emerged, and have not only survived until now but are still holding their ground exceptionally well.

Burner: A founder in his 60s. Still firmly holding the #1 spot in the industry. A veteran who excellently solves the user's fundamental problems and maintains that presence.

Zedge: A founder approaching his 70s. Still going strong.

C25K: Just two co-founders have built and are maintaining 11 apps. It looked so cool to see them working while truly enjoying life.

PhotoVault: A CEO who created it at a young age, has maintained its #1 global presence to this day, and is still deeply passionate about the product.

AppBlock: The pioneer of services that lock specific apps to help you focus. However, perhaps due to a lack of a technical moat, they lost their market presence a while ago to a latecomer, Opal. A big part of the reason was failing to properly execute global expansion and marketing. They solved the core problem well, but missed out on building a global presence beyond Europe. There was a lesson to be learned here as a cautionary tale.

A Word of Wisdom from the Zedge Founder

The most impressive moment during our conversations was a question I threw at the Zedge CEO. "What do we need to do to double our DAU?" I was expecting an answer closer to a bottom-level execution strategy, but the response was unexpected.

You first need to look back and see if you are effectively delivering the value you were already providing to your users.
And only by gradually expanding that value within the product can your DAU increase.

The path Zedge took, expanding from ringtones to wallpapers, was exactly that. Hearing this made me realize that Alarmy is ultimately walking the same path. From audio alarms to video alarms, from photo missions to AI missions. We've gradually expanded while maintaining our core value. It was a reaffirmation from the mouth of a guru that product growth is ultimately the expansion of value.

Alarmy was also launched in 2012, so perhaps we belong in the guru tier. It felt quite proud and justified to bring up Alarmy's story among them. The fact that we are practically the only case among countless alarm apps launched since then that is building a global presence through growth strategies served as proof that we are doing things right.

Just solving the core problem isn't enough. It must go hand-in-hand with cementing a global presence, meaning the #1 position in overseas markets. This means we have to excel at both product localization and marketing.

This was the biggest lesson learned from AppBlocker's cautionary tale and that one piece of advice from Zedge.

b. Two Signals from the App Market

1) “Why Monetize 10% of Your Users When You Could Monetize 100%?”
2) “We Didn’t Create Virals. We Replicate Them.”

These were the two speech candidates I submitted. In the end, only the latter was selected. At first, I just brushed it off thinking, "Maybe it's because ad monetization looks a bit less flashy," but after spending five days at the event, I realized this result accurately pinpointed two signals from the market.

UGC is a mega-trend. Ad monetization hasn't quite reached that level yet.

b-1. UGC = Mega-Trend

The overwhelming consensus was that UA through paid channels no longer holds much significance. Everyone takes ASO and SEO as a given baseline, and how to build virality on top of that through TikTok, Reels, and Shorts was the top interest of every founder. The fact that 'We Don't Create Virals' was selected as a main speech was right in the dead center of this exact flow.

As soon as the presentation ended, a flood of Q&A poured in. Since even we hadn't been utilizing UGC for very long, everyone seemed to get the feeling of "We could do this too." It was a moment of truly feeling that we were standing right in the middle of a trend.

If we hadn't launched our viral squad last year and made these attempts, we definitely would have been left behind in this trend's current. We wouldn't have achieved product growth, and we wouldn't have established our presence at a global conference either. Ultimately, I felt a sense of relief and gratitude that it was a good call to move one step ahead.

b-2. Ad Monetization = An Undervalued Opportunity

Unlike UGC, ad monetization was still hard to call a mega-trend. Most of the founders I met were focusing on subscription monetization, and there weren't even many folks who had seriously considered advertising at all. In most cases, they had fleetingly thought about it but didn't dig any deeper, going off their intuition that "it probably won't make money."

However, the moment I brought up Alarmy's DAU and our $2M monthly ad revenue, the atmosphere shifted. Everyone was surprised and found it refreshing, and surprisingly, even the 1st generation gurus showed interest in ad monetization. Veterans like PhotoVault and R25K were the same. I believe this gap itself represents our upside. In a space everyone else left empty, we have already entered and are essentially leading the market.

Another piece of evidence in this same vein was the growth of AdMob. During the event, I had a direct meeting with AdMob and also participated in a panel talk hosted by them. Through that, one thought struck me strongly. "The AdMob org has never exerted this much influence across the entirety of Google before."

Up until now, Google Ads, YouTube, or Google Play usually led these events. Honestly, this was the first time seeing an ad monetization solution get this much spotlight. As for what this means, I think it suggests that the scale and potential of the in-app ad monetization market have grown so much that Google is giving AdMob this level of attention.

In reality, the AdMob product has been rapidly adding features needed from a publisher's perspective. There were at least over 10, but to briefly introduce just a few -

- Strengthening ad sources (Demand) for revenue maximization: New, influential bidders are coming in, and the UX around the mediation process for them has become much cleaner. Unreal filtering and targeting features are scheduled to be added.

- Increasing development and operational convenience: A dedicated solution capable of monitoring journeys on a traffic level is scheduled to launch, which will solve tricky debugging issues when crashes or bugs occur. They apparently did a full refactoring of the entire SDK just for this...

It was genuinely fascinating to see them paying meticulous attention to so many other details. Pumping this much human resource into it is undeniably a strong signal that they view the future of the ad monetization market as extremely promising.

Now We Need to Organize Our Own Global Sessions Too

Ultimately, Alarmy is a product standing at the intersection of these two currents. Places that are truly good at both UGC and ad monetization can be counted on one hand. The very fact that we were selected for both the AdMob panel talk (ad monetization) and a main speech (Viral) this time acts as proof of this positioning.

If we organize and run our own sessions, there will definitely be quite a few publishers interested, and it would naturally serve as an outlet that can lead to partnerships.

c. The Starting Line for Korea Has Changed

Something I felt even more than the industry changes was the shift in Korea's standing.

Back in the old days when going on global business trips (like MWC Barcelona or TUNE events in Seattle), there were so many moments where I first had to explain "what kind of country Korea is." No matter how well our company did, since Korea's overall recognition was low, normalizing it to a global standard meant our presence inevitably took a hit.

This time was very different. Basically everyone already knew Korean greetings like "Annyeonghaseyo" or "Gamsahamnida," and they'd pull out whatever Korean words they knew as if to show off. Countless people had actually visited Korea, too. With K-Pop and Squid Game serving as natural conversational topics, the time it took to break the ice during first encounters was shortened.

This change in the starting line is certainly not a trivial matter. Whether the company is doing well or not, the foundational baseline has been leveled up a notch.

d. The Conviction to Go Global Became Even Stronger

Actually, because Korea's standing had risen, my conviction that we need to go further into the global market became even more solid. There's zero reason to stay confined within Korea.

d-1. The Discovery of Vietnam

In Asia, the #2 market based on ad revenue was Vietnam. I had assumed that after China, second place would be Korea or Japan, so Vietnam was a massive realization. Moving forward, when looking at a publisher's nationality, the Vietnam side is a market we absolutely have to keep our eyes on.

What was even more impressive was the fact that in Vietnam, they build apps from the very beginning targeting overseas markets rather than their domestic one. Their perspective itself is inherently global. It's a mindset definitely worth learning from if we end up building new services later.

d-2. The Exact Opposite Perspective on Acquisitions

Along similar lines, I met several groups who buy and grow apps just like we do. Among them, a group targeting only Android acquisitions, not iOS, left an impression. We naturally look mainly at iOS because of the growth potential and the richness of the playbook. However, their perspective was the exact opposite.

"Android assets are much cheaper than iOS. It's actually more profitable to buy them at a low price and grow them."

A perspective that tackles the same game from the complete opposite direction.

Being able to pick up these fresh new perspectives might just be the greatest asset of attending global conferences.

d-3. Alarmy Becomes Our Global Business Card

Thanks to the multiple presentations we gave, we were able to quickly build trust even with people we were meeting for the first time. What we newly tried and achieved some level of success with essentially became our business card. That's exactly why we were able to gain well over 100 genuine connections at the networking events.

d-4. English Is No Longer a Hurdle

Lastly, one personal thought. Chatting all day in English, explaining our projects, and listening to others takes quite a bit of cognitive resource. My tongue was practically cramping up;

Because of that, we intentionally barely used Korean, even when it was just us. It wasn't just for language practice, but because I didn't want to break the sensation of being completely immersed in the local context. Pushing through like that all the way to the end ironically made English feel comfortable later on. There were definitely moments where I thought, "Ah, this actually works." The confidence that English is no longer a hurdle in performing my job. It was a small but solid takeaway.

Looking Back, My One-Line Takeaway Is This

The global market was much larger and more diverse than we thought, and Alarmy is navigating right through the center of it remarkably well.

An organization standing at the intersection of the UGC and ad monetization currents,
simultaneously showcasing the fundamental essence of the 1st generation gurus and the growth tactics of latecomers.

An organization that can claim its spot even more clearly thanks to Korea's elevated starting line.

In and of itself, it was a deeply proud and confident five days.

If I get to go back there next time, I truly hope to meet everyone again inside a session we host ourselves!