Mobile growth has never been as simple as running an ad, sending someone to the app store, and hoping they install. Even before Custom Product Pages, web-to-app flows, and AI-driven discovery, teams were navigating paid UA, ASO, CRM, lifecycle messaging, attribution, retention, monetisation, and post-install behaviour simultaneously. The funnel, as a planning framework, has always been a simplification of something far messier.
But what’s changing in 2026 is the number of surfaces, entry points, and influence moments that teams need to coordinate across. Apple now allows up to 70 Custom Product Pages per app, with keyword linking enabling organic discovery since July 2025. Web-to-app flows are giving teams ownership of pre-install experiences outside the app store, while in-app events surface content directly in search results. Moreover, CTV advertising drives installs from the living room, and AI-powered discovery channels like the ChatGPT App Directory introduce entirely new ways for users to find apps.
Each of these creates new opportunities, but each also creates new coordination challenges. The teams that treat mobile growth as a connected system will manage this complexity well; the teams that don’t will find themselves spending more, learning slower, and delivering fragmented user experiences.
In this article, we’ll look at why mobile growth increasingly requires coordination across more surfaces and teams, what’s actually new in 2025 and 2026 versus what’s been true for a while, and how an integrated approach helps teams turn complexity into an advantage.
What the funnel captures and what it misses
In many ways, the traditional funnel, awareness to consideration to conversion to retention, remains a useful planning tool. It gives teams a shared language for where users are in the journey and helps structure who owns what. That hasn’t changed and probably won’t.
What the funnel doesn’t capture well is how users actually move through that journey. Google’s Messy Middle research showed that consumers cycle between exploration and evaluation in unpredictable ways, influenced by cognitive biases, social proof, and whatever information happens to be available at the right moment. Growth loops describe how product usage itself generates acquisition (Spotify Wrapped being a textbook example), while lifecycle models show that retention, reactivation, and monetisation feed back into acquisition in ways a linear funnel can’t represent.
What’s important here, though, is to remember that in mobile, all of these dynamics are at play simultaneously. A user might see a TikTok ad, search the App Store a week later, read reviews, compare three competitors, get retargeted on Instagram, scan a QR code at an event, and finally install through a web-to-app flow. In this scenario, the “funnel” that the user went through looks nothing like awareness-consideration-conversion. Rather, it’s a web of influence moments across multiple surfaces, and the team that manages those surfaces as a connected system has a meaningful advantage over the team that treats each one in isolation.
What’s actually new in 2025 and 2026
Mobile growth has been complex for years. But several recent platform developments have genuinely expanded the number of surfaces teams need to manage:
More personalised store experiences. Apple doubled the Custom Product Page limit to 70 in October 2025 and introduced keyword linking so CPPs can appear in organic search, not just paid campaigns. Google’s Custom Store Listings offer similar capability. For the first time, different users arriving through different channels can see genuinely different store experiences. This is a meaningful shift, but it’s one example of a broader trend toward personalised acquisition paths, not the whole story.
Web-to-app as a strategic option. More teams are routing users through web experiences before the app store, and this goes beyond simply sending paid traffic to a landing page. Web-to-app can mean connecting existing web demand to the app, using web onboarding or paywalls, testing messaging outside app store review cycles, improving attribution visibility, supporting users who move between web and app naturally, or managing payment flows with lower processing fees. Since the 2025 Epic v. Apple ruling, US apps can link to external purchase options, making web-based monetisation more viable, though the broader challenge of managing payment flows, platform fees, checkout friction, user trust, and regional rules extends well beyond a single ruling.
New discovery and influence surfaces. In-app events now surface in search results and on store pages, creating additional moments where users encounter your app. CTV advertising reaches users in a completely different context. The ChatGPT App Directory introduces AI-driven recommendation as a discovery channel. Each of these adds another surface that needs to be coordinated with the rest.
Continued signal loss. ATT consent rates remain low, and SKAN’s replacement, AdAttributionKit, introduces its own limitations. The shared data layer that used to paper over organisational silos has gotten thinner, which makes first-party data and cross-team data sharing more important than ever.
These are genuine changes. But they sit on top of a growth system that has always included paid, organic, CRM, lifecycle, product, monetisation, and analytics. The risk here, I think, is treating them as isolated additions rather than connected parts of a system that already needed better coordination as opposed to one holistic system.
What breaks when teams manage new surfaces in old ways
As acquisition paths and influence moments multiply, the cost of working in silos goes up. When there were fewer surfaces, a paid team, an ASO team, and a CRM team could work in parallel without much coordination and the user experience would still feel reasonably coherent, because everything converged on one store listing.
With 70 possible Custom Product Pages, web-to-app flows, in-app events, and AI-driven discovery, there are now dozens of places where the user can encounter your app, each requiring its own creative, messaging, and measurement. When each of these is managed by a different team using different tools, a few things start breaking.
When a paid campaign sends traffic to a Custom Product Page that tells a different story than the ad, or an in-app event promotes something the CRM team hasn’t heard about, or a web landing page emphasises a benefit that never appears in onboarding, users notice the inconsistency even if the teams behind it don’t. Each surface is telling a slightly different version of the story, and nobody is reading them all together.
The measurement problem is just as real. Web-to-app flows, store page variants, in-app events, and paid campaigns all generate their own data, but when that data lives in separate systems with no connection between them, nobody can see which pathways actually drive value beyond the install. Teams end up optimising individual surfaces without understanding how they fit into the bigger picture.
Moreover, the pace of learning suffers too. When the ASO team discovers that a specific value proposition converts well on the store page, the paid team should hear about it. When the CRM team finds that certain acquisition cohorts churn within a week, that should change how the paid team spends. But when these learnings stay inside individual teams, everyone ends up solving problems that someone else in the building already solved weeks ago.
As our CEO Andy Carvell argues in the integrated growth manifesto, the tools and platforms aren’t the bottleneck here. Most teams already have the data they need. What they’re missing is an operating model that moves learnings across teams as fast as the surfaces are multiplying.
What an integrated approach actually looks like
The Phiture angle here isn’t that the funnel is new. It’s that mobile growth now requires a more connected operating model to manage the complexity that comes with more surfaces, more entry points, and more handoffs across teams. A few principles that tend to make the biggest difference:
Coordinate messaging across every surface the user touches. When you have dozens of possible entry points (CPPs, CSLs, web landing pages, in-app events, paid ads, CRM messages), the risk is that the story fragments. Each surface should feel like a version of the same brand, adapted to its context but coherent with everything else. This requires creative direction that spans paid, organic, CRM, and product, not just an ASO team managing screenshots or a UA team managing ads.
Connect acquisition, activation, retention, and monetisation data. These aren’t separate functions that happen in sequence; in fact, they’re parts of a connected system where each one influences the others. CRM learnings should inform acquisition, while ASO intent signals should inform CRM and paywalls. Paid campaign data should shape store page creative. Monetisation data should influence which users the paid team targets. When these connections exist, the system compounds learning. When they don’t, each team optimises its own metric while the overall user experience suffers.
Use new surfaces as testing opportunities, not just distribution channels. CPPs and CSLs aren’t just personalised store pages. They’re a testing layer where hypotheses can be validated against real users across both organic and paid traffic. Web-to-app flows aren’t just a payment optimisation play. They’re a way to test messaging, onboarding, and pricing faster than the app stores allow. In-app events aren’t just promotional tools. They’re discovery surfaces that can be timed to seasonal demand and coordinated with CRM campaigns. The teams that use these surfaces to learn, not just to distribute, will compound their advantage over time.
Invest in cross-team coordination, not just cross-team tools. Shared dashboards and data platforms help, but the bigger change is process. Regular cross-team syncs where paid, ASO, CRM, creative, product, and monetisation teams share what they’re seeing, what they’re planning, and what they’ve learned. Someone who owns the connection between these teams and is responsible for making sure the user journey tells a coherent story across every surface.
What’s next
Mobile growth is getting more complex, not less. AI-driven discovery will add new surfaces. Privacy changes will continue pushing teams toward first-party data and web-based flows. Platform features like CPPs, CSLs, and in-app events will keep expanding. The question for mobile teams isn’t whether this complexity is coming. It’s whether their operating model is built to handle it.
The opportunity is real. More surfaces mean more ways to match message to intent, more ways to personalise the experience, and more ways to learn from user behaviour. But capturing that opportunity requires stronger coordination, better measurement, and shared learning across teams. The teams that build for this will manage the complexity. The teams that don’t will be managed by it.
At Phiture, we’ve been building for this shift. Our integrated growth approach connects paid, organic, creative, CRM, and product so that learnings flow across the full system rather than staying locked in individual channels. Tools like PressPlay help teams test creative across multiple store page variants at scale, and Catchbase optimises paid spend across the channels feeding into the system. If you’re rethinking how your growth team operates, get in touch.
FAQ
Has the mobile marketing funnel changed?
Mobile growth has always been more complex than a simple linear funnel. What’s changing is the number of surfaces, entry points, and influence moments that teams need to coordinate across. Custom Product Pages, web-to-app flows, in-app events, CTV, and AI-driven discovery have all added new places where users encounter your app, and managing them requires stronger coordination across teams.
Is the funnel still a useful framework?
Yes, as a planning tool. It gives teams a shared language for where users are in the journey. But it works best when combined with other frameworks like growth loops, lifecycle models, and Google’s Messy Middle, which better capture the non-linear way users actually make decisions.
What’s actually new in mobile growth in 2025 and 2026?
Several platform changes are genuinely recent: Apple doubling the CPP limit to 70 and enabling keyword-linked organic discovery, the Epic v. Apple ruling allowing external payment links in the US, expanding web-to-app capabilities, in-app events surfacing in search, and AI-driven discovery channels like the ChatGPT App Directory. These sit on top of a growth system that has always required coordination across paid, organic, CRM, product, and monetisation.
What is integrated growth?
Integrated growth is an operating model where acquisition, ASO, CRM, creative, product, and monetisation work as a connected system rather than separate functions. Learnings from one area inform decisions in every other area, and the user experience is coordinated across every surface they encounter.
Why do silos become more expensive as surfaces multiply?
When there were fewer surfaces, teams could work independently and the user experience would still feel reasonably coherent because everything converged on one store listing. With dozens of entry points, each requiring its own creative, messaging, and measurement, disconnected teams produce inconsistent experiences, fragmented data, and duplicated learning. The cost of not coordinating goes up with every new surface added.
What is the first step toward a more integrated growth model?
Start by connecting the data across your key surfaces so every team can see what the others are seeing. Regular cross-team syncs where paid, ASO, CRM, creative, and product share their learnings are the simplest way to begin. From there, identify the handoffs where messaging or measurement breaks down, and assign someone to own those connections.
Table of Contents
