AppsFlyer announced its second-ever “real” acquisition on Wednesday (its first was an acqui-hire in 2018) with the purchase of devtodev, an analytics provider for app and game developers.
There are multiple rationales for buying the company, said AppsFlyer CEO and Co-Founder Oren Kaniel. He declined to share the deal price, but he did say all of devtodev’s roughly 25 employees are coming aboard.
The more straightforward reason behind the acquisition is because AppsFlyer was impressed by devtodev’s technology, which includes tools to analyze user behavior, run cohort analysis, forecast user lifetime value and track performance.
But AppsFlyer is also starting to populate its new Privacy Cloud Marketplace, which is on track to launch sometime next year. Closed beta testing of the marketplace began in October.
Stress test
The purpose of the marketplace is to provide a clean-room-like environment where companies can develop software and run secure data collaboration projects with third-party services and plugins without having to share any user-level customer data or build their own data lakes.
AppsFlyer is recruiting software and analytics providers to join the marketplace.
But adding devtodev to its marketplace as an owned subsidiary rather than as an external partner will allow AppsFlyer to more efficiently pressure test the concept of a data collaboration marketplace, said Barak Witkowski, AppsFlyer’s chief product officer.
By building all the APIs and configurations for devtodev to hook into the marketplace, AppsFlyer can ensure the process works smoothly and “make it as easy and convenient as possible for other partners to join later,” Witkowski said.
AppsFlyer customers will be able to use devtodev’s tools right away, but they won’t be available to mix and match with other services for data collaboration purposes until the marketplace fully launches in 2024.
In addition to devtodev, AppsFlyer is planning to acquire another company for its marketplace before the end of the year, although it couldn’t share specific details about that deal yet.
Staying privacy wise
Secure collaboration and data minimization are quickly moving from nice-to-haves to de rigueur – and not just due to data privacy laws. The platforms are making privacy moves of their own.
Apple will soon require developers to justify any third-party data collection they do within their apps using “privacy manifest” files provided by their SDK and API partners. Meanwhile, the SDK Runtime API, which is now in beta inside the Android Privacy Sandbox, will cut off an SDK’s ability to gather in-app data without consent.
The upshot is that the curtain is coming down on unauthorized data sharing.
AppsFlyer’s customers regularly use SDKs that have access to event and in-app engagement data to do marketing and product analytics. The way it works today, Witkowski said, is that developers integrate SDKs that often send sensitive data between multiple service providers, servers and downstream partners.
“That is why it’s better privacy-wise for this data to only be in one place, and doing that also creates better data alignment so that marketing and product teams are working with the same set of data,” Witkowski said. “They can both make better decisions.”
Although, today, many of AppsFlyer’s clients are gaming companies, it’s starting to attract more traditional non-gaming enterprise customers, some of which operate in highly regulated industries, such as banking or alcohol sales.
Working with risk-averse brands like US Bank, for example, and AB InBev, both of which are AppsFlyer clients, means that providing a safe and secure infrastructure for managing and analyzing data together with partners is a nonnegotiable requirement.
“They’ll still be able to talk to each other and communicate through data,” Kaniel said, “but without having access to the entire data set.”
‘We are here’
The timing of the devtodev deal and the second acquisition to come is unaffected by the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
Although AppsFlyer has offices in 20 countries, roughly 900 of its more than 1,500 employees are based in Israel.
During the first two weeks after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, AppsFlyer gave its employees time to mourn, process and recalibrate.
“If people can work, they do, and if they can’t, we also support them, and others step in,” Kaniel said.
But with the war entering its fifth week, AppsFlyer is returning to business as usual as much as possible.
“We’ve decided, as a company, to show, first of all, to ourselves, but also to our customers, partners, investors, shareholders and the world, that nothing is going to slow us down,” Kaniel said. “We are here.”
