The MMP Category Is Running on the Wrong Clock

There is a concept I keep coming back to: two clocks running at different speeds.

One clock is the market. The other is the language we use to describe it. In a fast-moving category, the gap between those two clocks is where the most interesting things happen.

In mobile measurement, the gap has become enormous. And I think it is time to name that.

The term “MMP”, Mobile Measurement Partner, was set roughly a decade ago. Adjust launched in 2012. AppsFlyer in 2011. The category made sense then: mobile apps were a new surface, attribution was a new problem, and the job was to track installs from mobile campaigns and route the data back to whoever bought the ad.

That clock was set in 2012. It is still running. The market clock has moved somewhere completely different.

Here is my argument in one line: each of the three words in “MMP”, Mobile, Measurement, Partner, has quietly stopped describing what these platforms actually do. Below is the evidence, and then what I think the category should be called instead.

Three data points from the last few months

First: US App Store consumer spending fell 6% year on year in Q2 2026, the first decline in a decade of Sensor Tower tracking. Meanwhile, total player spend is not falling. The money is moving off the stores entirely. Sensor Tower now estimates roughly 30% of revenue from the top 100 US casino titles never appears in App Store or Google Play data at all. Monopoly Go: about a third of revenue via web store. DoubleDown Interactive: 52% D2C. And those are just the ones with a public number. AppsFlyer’s own director of product for gaming wrote it plainly: “it’s entirely possible the industry looks like it’s shrinking on paper while individual businesses are actually growing.”

Second: Every major MMP is racing away from the MMP name as fast as they can. AppsFlyer is a “Measurement Partner” and a “Modern Marketing Cloud.” Adjust is a “Marketing Cloud.” Kochava is building StationOne, described internally as an “orchestration layer” owning creative production, activation, attribution and analytics in one place. Tenjin shipped MCP write access in July, letting AI assistants take action on campaigns, not just read the data.

One competitor was recently quoted saying: “Nobody cares about MMP anymore. That’s official now.” They are right. The category they invented is one they are actively trying to escape. Which is a signal.

Third: The Unity Claude Code plugin shipped last week with 29 native engine skills. Two of them are LevelPlay and in-app purchases. Agents can now configure mediation waterfalls and IAP products directly inside the project. The measurement layer is being wired up by an AI assistant, not a growth engineer reading MMP documentation.

The “M” for Measurement (passive reporting, dashboards, retrospective data) no longer describes what serious studios need. They need intelligence. Forecasting. Recommendations. Systems that act, not just systems that record.

A fourth point, made carefully

The “P” in MMP, Partner, implies neutrality. Independent measurement.

Adjust is fully owned by AppLovin: at once an ad network and a game-studio acquirer. Adjust measures the campaigns its parent company’s network runs. That is not a neutral position.

AppsFlyer raised $1 billion in June 2026 from Google, Meta, Unity, and Moloco, four of the largest ad networks in mobile, and the four companies whose campaigns AppsFlyer is supposed to measure independently. I am not making a political argument here. I am making a structural one. When your investors are your measurement subjects, independence becomes a claim that requires evidence rather than a claim that can simply be asserted.

The measurement industry has a conflict of interest problem at the top. It is structural, not temporary.

So what should we call it?

If the “Mobile” part is wrong, the “Measurement” part is wrong, and the “Partner” part has become complicated, what should we call it?

I have been thinking about this for a while. The answer I keep arriving at is: App Intelligence Platform.

To be clear, this is not a rejection of MMP. It is what the category has grown into. An App Intelligence Platform still does everything a mobile measurement partner does. It just does more, and the name reflects that.

App: not mobile-only. The revenue is off the stores. The traffic is web-to-app. The audiences are on streaming platforms, subscription products, social feeds. “App” covers all of it without pretending the stores are still the whole picture.

Intelligence: not management. Not reporting. The job in 2026 is to turn data into decisions, not into dashboards. Forecasting, anomaly detection, cohort-level insight, AI-assisted recommendations. The platforms doing this well are already operating as intelligence layers, not measurement tools.

Platform: because studios do not want another point solution. They want infrastructure. One SDK, one data model, one place where attribution and analytics and forecasting live together.

One honest thing

Renaming is easy. Any company can change what it calls itself. The harder question is whether the product actually does what the name says.

At justtrack, we are not introducing AIP as a marketing move. We are building toward it. Attribution, in-app analytics, forecasting, AI-native features, MCP integrations, web-to-app measurement: these are not features we are announcing. They are things that are either already live or on a clear path.

The name should follow the work. Not the other way around. And the work says: the category has already moved. The clocks just need to catch up.

Thoughts welcome. If you are a UA lead or a studio building toward this problem, I would genuinely like to hear how you are thinking about it.

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