Two platforms just removed the install. Most UA teams haven’t clocked it yet.

We built justtrack’s attribution and analytics inside gaming, which has about the hardest data requirements in mobile. So when two big platforms shipped the same idea in the same week, I paid attention, and I don’t think most UA teams have fully processed what it means yet.

What actually happened

In the same week, two companies that do not coordinate said the same thing. YouTube expanded its instant-play games, Playables, to more than fifty markets. And Meta announced Horizon Create: you type a prompt, get a playable game, and publish it straight to Instagram or Facebook. No app, no download, no store page.

And none of it is an install. So there is no click ID, and no postback to attach anything to.

Isn’t this just a small experiment?

That is what I thought, until I looked at the numbers. One hypercasual title inside YouTube Playables has over a hundred million plays, and the studios publishing there are the same ones that dominate the App Store charts: Voodoo, Supersonic, CrazyLabs. So this is not a new audience. It is the existing mobile gaming audience, same genres, same studios, on a surface that produces zero attribution data.

Haven’t we solved attribution problems before? What’s different now?

We have, and that is the useful comparison. In 2021 Apple made attribution harder by restricting what you could know about an install that still happened. This is the same shift from the opposite direction: these platforms remove the install as a concept entirely.

Every measurement framework in mobile assumes an install exists. Here, a player taps a video, plays inside the feed, and never installs anything. There is a play count, and nothing else.

Does justtrack have a solution for this?

Honestly, not yet, and I would rather say that plainly. There is nothing to integrate with on these surfaces today. But we built justtrack cohort-first, because a gaming audience was never one group behaving one way on one surface.

So when Playables gets in-app purchases in 2027, the question will not be “can you install an SDK in a feed game.” It will be “can you fold that player into the same cohort picture as everyone else who plays your game.” That is what we are built for.

If you are already publishing into Playables, I would like to hear what you are seeing. Not to sell you anything, there is nothing to sell yet, just to understand it before everyone is asking at once.