Business of Apps London 2026 is now officially a wrap… and what an event it was… Seriously, it was absolutely amazing.

The audience speaks for itself. In the days leading up to the event, we registered over 1,100 senior app leaders, working across marketing, product, and monetisation. Thanks to everyone who registered, we were also able to plant 1,100+ trees via our Treeapp partnership.

On the day, more than 900 convened in The Brewery for a day of learning and exchange. Over 73% of attendees represented apps, brands, and mobile games, of which 19.3% have 10M+ monthly active users (MAUs), 63% have 1M+ MAUs, and 83.3% have 100K+ MAUs.

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What’s more, 72.8% of attendees were either budget holders (49.6%) or budget influencers (23.2%). The top app categories represented at the event were finance, health and fitness, travel, gaming, and shopping.

Known for its outstanding networking opportunities, the 2026 iteration of BOA London exceeded expectations on every count. We registered over 31,100 website visitors and more than 69,700 page views. Thanks to the event’s dedicated networking app, over 4,900 contacts were made, 4,000 messages exchanged, and 1,750 discussions created.

The energy was electrifying, and the learning, as always, insightful. Across eight content stages, featuring 50+ sessions and 80+ speakers, we heard deep dives on every topic imaginable — from ASO, retention, engagement, UA to recent platform changes, growth strategies to adopt in 2026 and beyond, and everyone’s favourite AI.

Now that the dust has settled, and we’ve all had a moment to breathe, relax, and gather our thoughts, it’s time to revisit the day’s sessions and talks and explore the key learnings and trends that were shared.

Lessons from the trenches: How Mob became the UK’s most popular recipe app

We were off to a stellar start once Benjamin Lebus, CEO at Mob, hit the stage to deliver this year’s keynote address. He shared four key lessons that might seem obvious but often get forgotten or overlooked. For Mob, in fact, they were the difference between being £1.2M in debt to topping the App Store charts.

Lesson 1) Distraction is death, as Ben put it. The most important thing when building a digital product is to stay focused and avoid shiny object syndrome. Don’t branch out too much, too quickly.

Instead, figure out what specific problem you are trying to solve for users and laser focus on just that. Too many side projects are a recipe for a mediocre core product.

Lesson 2) Speaking of solving problems, your product needs to be the painkiller in your users’ lives. You probably know the painkiller vs vitamin metaphor, so I will spare you the details.

The long and short of it is that you need to locate a precise pain point people are experiencing in their lives and then laser focus on alleviating it…

And speaking of laser focusing… see lesson No. 1.

Lesson 3) If you want a really good product people really enjoy using, you need to be experimentation-minded. Never stop iterating — you never know when you are going to hit on a gold mine… or a duck 🦆… those who were there will know what I am talking about. (Okay, fine, I will tell you. Mob’s best ad featured a dancing duck.)

Lesson 4) This one is mostly for founders. You need to learn when it is time to stop overseeing everything and let your team do their job. Most of you have built great and reliable teams — they can handle copy, creatives, and pretty much everything else on their own. Your time and expertise are best spent elsewhere. Put simply, stop meddling so much.

Pulling the threads together: Big ideas, bold strategies, trends, and more

Beyond the keynote, a litany of other topics and ideas were explored during the day.

Here’s just an amuse-bouche selection of what struck us as the most impactful ones:

Subscription apps are exploding

Let’s leave AI — there was plenty of that, of course — aside for now and focus on something different. (To allay your fears, yes, I will be returning to AI in a moment.)

Subscription apps are exploding, as Dieter Rappold, Co-Founder and CEO at ContextSDK, put it in his LinkedIn post. Dieter is referring, of course, to Rik Haandrikman’s session, during which the latter broke down benchmarks from over 115,000 subscription apps, representing more than $16 billion in revenue. (If you don’t know Rik, he is the VP of Growth at RevenueCat, aka the guys with the most elaborate booth at the event.)

In recent years, subscription apps have grown from around 2K per month to roughly 15K per month. At the same time, trials are getting exponentially shorter, but churn remains a big problem for most subscription apps. Interestingly, most of it is actually failed payments, suggesting a potential infrastructure problem, on the one hand, as well as the need for more proactive communication to ensure apps have up-to-date payment details for every user, on the other.

Growth is very much still there — the sky is the limit, as we like to say. However, there’s also a lot of noise, forcing brands to think out of the box if they want to stand out.

The onboarding opportunity

“Onboarding may be the highest leverage growth opportunity,” as Emily Turner, Director of Product Marketing at Vira Health, put it in her LinkedIn post. She draws on an App Talk interview between the one and only Peggy Anne Salz and Daphne Tideman.

In her interview, Daphne put it how it is (bonus points if you can catch my literary reference here): Apps and brands should stop chasing growth for growth’s sake and get around to fixing their onboarding. Onboarding isn’t simply a one-off sequence of screens users are forced to swipe through at the beginning of their app journey.

On the contrary, it can be progressive, spread across a few initial sessions. Certain stages of an onboarding might unlock only after a user has hit a specific milestone or has tried interacting with a given feature, which might not necessarily happen on the first day. The best onboarding adapts to both the nature of the app it’s trying to introduce as well as the user behaviour data available.

Emily put it best: “The best apps use onboarding to answer unspoken questions about value, trust, and what to do next.”

AI was… everywhere

Okay, fine, let’s talk about AI now. As expected, AI was everywhere, and a multitude of talks explored how LLMs are changing discovery, engagement, retention, monetisation, and beyond.

The AI coding boom, aka vibe coding, has led to an explosion of new app releases, pushing the Apple App Store to a record number of total apps. By the end of 2025, the total number of apps on the Apple App Store had reached 2.28M, according to our app stores data, representing an increase of 160,000 year-on-year.

New apps launched by month 2022 to 2025 (%)

Simultaneously, app discovery is being completely reshaped by LLMs. Marketers now also need to worry about how they appear in AI chatbot responses, especially in light of Apple’s recent decision to make the App Store data fully crawl-able on the web. While we are still in the relatively early stages of this change, ASO is about to get very different in the coming months and years.

Meanwhile, others, such as Yasin Kheradmand, Head of Growth at Stakemate, took a slightly different approach to AI, sharing three practical ways to use AI right now. He advised the audience to think of AI agents as the new “junior marketers,” which also means, however, training them accordingly and giving them access to key information — such as branding, market positioning, business objectives, etc.

There was a plethora of advice and tactics shared, but if we had to single out one, our biggest take-away on the AI front would be this: Don’t rush it, don’t simply follow trends, and don’t aim to build proprietary AI, especially if you are on the smaller side of things business-wise.

Instead, figure out what specific problem you are trying to solve, gather all the data available on the matter, and then, and only then, reach for the ever-so-tempting AI solution.

Adding AI on top of everything is a recipe for disaster. As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. If you want real results, use AI to plug the gap between your vision, an actual problem in the product, and the data available which your AI of choice can use to help solve the problem.

The point should be pretty clear by now. Be data-centric, and everything should be fine… fingers crossed.

Winning the attention game

Ours is an attention economy, baby. Before committing to a subscription or making an in-app subscription, the most valuable thing a user can offer a brand is their attention. The question is: Are you capturing that attention?

With millions of marketing emails being sent out every day (but the majority of those going unread and even unopened) and the average user receiving around 60 push notifications per day, it’s safe to say that simply sending more CRM messages won’t cut it. Good and effective re-engagement requires much more creativity and much smarter channel choices across push, in-app, and lifecycle messaging, as Emily put it.

Personalisation alone won’t suffice either. Personalised communication is a bare minimum that pretty much all users expect by now. Winning in the attention economy requires much more creativity, much more out-of-the-box thinking, and an inherently human touch to everything a company does; AI alone won’t cut it.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. A wealth of other ideas were shared and trends explored, but we don’t have the time or space to feature them all in what’s already a pretty long article.

We suggest you check out the event’s agenda. Next week, all the session recordings will be dropping on YouTube, and you will be able to catch up on all the action in your own time. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or sign up for our weekly newsletter, where we will be posting blog post summaries of most of the sessions.

A HUGE thanks to everyone who attended and to those who took the time to write up LinkedIn summaries of their key take-aways. We read and appreciated every last one of them, and apologies if we didn’t get around to mentioning yours.

We look forward to seeing you again in London next year. BOA London returns on April 22nd, 2027, and you can already grab yourself a launch ticket here. In the meantime, consider joining us in New York on September 17th or Berlin on November 12th.