AppLovin Q4 2025 earnings: understanding AppLovin’s risks — Thread

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Anonymous Frog 7279 Feb 13, 2026 2:16 am

Eric - very curious on your thoughts on two points:
Firstly, the last paragraph where Adam is saying that nothing has changed for Meta on IDFA-based traffic, but competition/AXON has gotten better. Is he implying that AXON outperforms Meta for IDFA-traffic?
Secondly, my understanding is that AppLovin only let you run certain ROAS campaigns through AXON if you are also using MAX as your mediation platform. Isn't that the biggest lock-in factor for MAX?

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Anonymous Octopus 2373 Feb 13, 2026 12:20 pm

This is the main thing that people don't really get. In order to use Axon you have to run MAX as your mediation platform. That is the single biggest ecosystem lock that APP has.

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Eric Feb 13, 2026 12:33 pm

Yes, numerous structural mechanisms exist for lock-in. I speak to that in the Twitter thread I linked in the piece.

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Eric Feb 13, 2026 12:34 pm

I don’t have any helpful thoughts on the first point. On the second: that could be one factor. I don’t know how to rank it against other factors.

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