In 2026, French app publishers face a mature, competitive, and privacy-conscious mobile market. France’s app economy generated $3 billion in revenue in 2024, up 20.9% year on year, with more than 50 million smartphone users and over 2 billion app downloads. The French mobile audience is also highly addressable on Android, as Android accounts for 65% of the mobile operating system market share in France in 2026, compared with 35% for iOS.
At the same time, mobile advertising in France has become concentrated around digital channels where search, social, and display dominate spend. The French digital advertising market reached €12.44 billion in 2025, up 11.3% year on year, with search at €4.93 billion, social at €4.18 billion, and display at €2.32 billion. Within that mix, mobile is already the default gateway for major performance channels. Mobile represented about 77% of search revenue and about 96% of social revenue in France in 2025.
The State of Mobile Apps in France
France is one of Europe’s most established app economies, but the focus for French UA teams should be the domestic mobile opportunity. High smartphone adoption, strong app download volume, and a digital ad market where mobile-led channels already command the largest budgets.
Here are some headline numbers:
- Temu was the most-downloaded app in France in 2024, with 13 million users.
- $3 billion in app revenue, up 20.9% year on year.
- 50 million+ people in France have a smartphone and access apps.
- 2 billion+ apps were downloaded in France in a single year.
- The average French smartphone user downloaded 42 apps in 2024.
- TikTok was the top-grossing app in France in 2024, at $39 million in revenue.
Smartphone adoption in France is now close to saturation. In the 2025 Baromètre du numérique, 91% of people aged 12 and over in France owned a smartphone, and 61% of smartphone owners had a 5G-compatible device. DataReportal also reported 74.5 million cellular mobile connections in France in early 2025, equivalent to 112% of the population, with 98.9% of those connections considered broadband.
That scale matters for advertising. In 2025, France’s digital advertising market reached €12.44 billion, with search representing 40% of the market, social 34%, display 19%, and affiliation/emailing/comparators 8%. Social was the largest contributor to growth in 2025, adding €554 million in revenue, while search added €456 million and display added €226 million.
Why Android Matters in France
The Android opportunity in France is not theoretical. With two-thirds of the mobile market share, it is by far the largest operating system audience for domestic reach.
The device picture also matters. In 2026, Apple accounts for 35% of mobile vendor share in France, while Samsung accounts for 30%, Xiaomi 11%, and Oppo 3%. For mobile OEM advertising, Samsung and Xiaomi are therefore the most immediately relevant OEM environments in France, with Oppo also present as a smaller but measurable Android OEM in the market.
That does not mean OEM advertising replaces Google, Meta, Apple Search Ads, or other established channels. It means the French Android market includes device-level discovery surfaces that sit outside the standard Google-Meta-Apple buying stack: OEM app stores, on-device placements, and opt-in setup flows.
What is mobile OEM advertising?
At its core, OEM advertising is the practice of buying inventory directly from smartphone manufacturers (Original Equipment Manufacturers): Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Huawei, Honor, and Transsion (Tecno, Itel, Infinix), typically through a specialist partner like AVOW.
Common misconceptions still frame OEM advertising as a narrow, regional, or low-flexibility channel. That may have been true a decade ago. Today, it reaches 1.85 billion daily active users across 86% of the global Android market through three distinct paths.
1. Alternative app stores. Manufacturers run their own app stores: Samsung Galaxy Store, Xiaomi GetApps, Huawei AppGallery, Oppo Store, Vivo V-Appstore, Transsion Palm Store. You list your app, you can pay for featured placements, and in many regions, you negotiate better revenue terms than Google or Apple offer.
2. On-device placements. Native display ads run across the device: banners, splash ads, interstitials, push notifications, app vault, default browser, lock screen, and in-store placements. Targeting uses appographic, behavioral, geographic, and socio-demographic signals read directly from the device, which sharpens optimization compared to standard DSPs.
3. Dynamic Preloads. Also known as the out-of-box experience (OOBE), these are apps delivered over the air during device setup, with user opt-in. Installs come from the Google Play Store or OEM alternative app stores, such as Xiaomi GetApps (OOBE), and are attributed through your MMP (Mobile Measurement Partner), which is fully compliant with all app store policies. This is the modern, opt-in version of preloads. For a deeper breakdown, see our Dynamic Preloads guide.
Across all three paths, inventory integrates with leading MMPs such as AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular, and Branch, and ad units are verified fraud-free by major MMPs. The point: OEM advertising is not a single ad unit. It is a full device ecosystem with multiple discovery moments, from setup to app store browsing to everyday on-device engagement.
Where Does OEM Advertising Fit in the French Mobile Advertising Market?
OEM advertising fits into the French market as an Android growth layer, not as a replacement for the existing media plan. The French digital advertising market is already large and still growing, with search and social the two current largest levers.
That creates the problem OEM advertising solves. If a French app publisher is already buying search and social, the next question is not whether French users are on mobile. They are. The question is whether there are Android discovery surfaces outside the usual auction environments that can add incremental reach.
The answer is yes, especially for Android.
The best way to scope it is by market, device mix, and measurement plan:
- If the goal is brand visibility as well as performance, test on-device placements alongside install-optimised placements.
- If the goal is incremental Android installs in France, start with Samsung and Xiaomi inventory because they are the largest non-Apple OEMs by French mobile vendor share.
- If the goal is app store diversification, test alternative app-store placements and merchandising in OEM-owned store environments.
- If the goal is setup-stage discovery, test Dynamic Preloads through Google Play Auto Install and measure the campaign through an MMP.
Does OEM advertising work? Three brands, three results
The reach numbers tell you the channel exists at scale. The question is whether that scale converts into outcomes that justify the line item. Three brands, three different verticals, three different regional focuses:
Tripledot Studios was running into a familiar gaming problem: efficient scale. The London-based publisher behind Solitaire and Woodoku had built a strong UA engine on the major platforms but needed new inventory to keep growth efficient as costs climbed. Working with AVOW across Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo, Tripledot combined display advertising with Dynamic Preloads via Google PAI, focused spend on key European markets, and tested expansion into Latin America and Southeast Asia. Campaigns outperformed EMEA targets by 20% and delivered 15% higher results than other preload channels.
“AVOW truly understands the gaming app landscape. Their ability to tap into new, scalable user acquisition channels and optimize targeting strategies has been invaluable.” — Ben Barta, Senior Growth Manager, Tripledot Studios
Exness faced a particular challenge familiar to regulated financial products. Many of the geos the international forex broker wanted to grow in restricted trading-app advertising on Meta and Google, which made traditional channels a non-starter in some of the highest-value markets on the roadmap. AVOW helped Exness expand across more than 40 countries through alternative app stores, including Xiaomi GetApps, Huawei AppGallery, and the Vivo V-AppStore, with a model built around cost-per-registration and ROI-focused quality benchmarks rather than raw install volume. The result: more than 250,000 monthly installs, 1000% ROAS in key markets across Q4 2024 and Q1 2025, and over 13,600 first-time deposits in 2024 at an average cost per FTD of €83.
“AVOW’s expertise in mobile OEM advertising allowed us to unlock new inventory sources, acquire high-quality traders, and optimize performance beyond traditional channels.” — Sotiris Sotiriadis, Performance (UA) Media Team Lead, Exness
Wooga, the Berlin-based studio behind June’s Journey, has been running OEM campaigns through AVOW for over two years. The narrative-driven puzzle category lives or dies on creative resonance and long-tail retention, which makes channel quality more important than raw volume. In a 2025 Behind the Apps interview, former Senior Performance Marketing Manager Ferry Noordermeer described OEMs as a growing part of the studio’s install mix, with particular success in European markets they previously had not reached. The team also noted that ROAS held up better than expected, with retained players continuing to play for longer than initial models predicted, a signal that OEM users are not just cheap installs but durable cohorts.
“Especially in European markets, we have seen great success with OEMs, where we previously didn’t even tap it. AVOW has been the key partner for us to grow.” — Ferry Noordermeer, Former Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Wooga
These three examples are only a snapshot of what OEM advertising can deliver. AVOW has run campaigns for more than 150 brands across Europe, Turkey, MENA, India, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and more. What these examples share matters most: each turned to OEM as a deliberate diversification play, not a last resort when other channels stopped working. That timing is the lesson for French publishers planning 2026. Browse the full library of AVOW success stories for results across gaming, e-commerce, fintech, and more.
How do you scope OEM advertising for your own app?
The question most growth teams ask first is not “should we test OEM” but “where do we start?” The answer depends on three inputs:
- The markets you are already winning in. If your CPI on Meta and Google is creeping up in your strongest geos, OEM is a defensive play to protect that base.
- The markets you want to expand into next. Match your roadmap against the regional reach table above. Europe at 57% justifies a test on its own.
- How Android-heavy your user base looks in each. iOS leads on revenue per user in France, but the Android scale that sits behind your expansion is exactly where OEM lives.
Three free resources make the scoping concrete.
The AVOW reach map shows the regional breakdown above and lets you drill into each region’s top OEMs. Useful for mapping the channel against your expansion plan: if your roadmap leans heavily on MENA or Africa, the reach numbers tell you OEM is not optional there. If you are reinforcing in Europe, the map shows where Samsung and Xiaomi alone can move the needle.
The AVOW reach calculator goes one level deeper. Pick a target market, tell us your vertical, and you get a specific monthly active users estimate against AVOW’s network. It is the fastest way to turn “we should look at OEM” into a number you can put in a planning deck
The 2026 Mobile OEM Advertising Guide is the long-form version of this article. It walks through every OEM partner, every ad format, every targeting capability, and the performance models AVOW runs across each one. If the reach map tells you where the inventory is and the calculator tells you how much, the guide tells you what to actually do with it. Recommended reading for anyone building the internal case to test OEM as a 2026 channel.
For French publishers, the practical starting point is simple: model Europe first with the reach map, size the opportunity with the calculator, then use the guide to shape the test plan. Together, the three resources take OEM from “interesting idea” to a sized line item your CFO can sign off on.
The bottom line for French app publishers
France is a mature mobile market with strong app revenue, high smartphone adoption, and more than 2 billion annual app downloads. It is also an Android-heavy market, with Android accounting for 65% of mobile OS share in 2026.
French mobile advertising is already built around digital performance channels. The market reached €12.44 billion in 2025, and search, social, and display together represented the majority of spend. Mobile is especially dominant in search and social revenue, making Android channel diversification a practical UA question rather than a theoretical one.
OEM advertising belongs in that conversation because it gives French app publishers access to device-level Android discovery: alternative app stores, on-device placements, and Dynamic Preloads. For teams already scaling in France, the channel should be tested as an incremental layer in the Android media mix.
Book a demo with the AVOW team for a tailored read on your stack, your markets, and where OEM fits in your 2026 plan.
FAQ
Is OEM advertising just preloads? No. OEM advertising covers three distinct paths: alternative app stores, on-device display placements, and Dynamic Preloads. Preloads are one option among many.
Does OEM advertising work in Europe? Yes. AVOW reaches 57% of European users through OEM partners, primarily Samsung and Xiaomi. The Digital Markets Act is increasing rather than decreasing OEM relevance in the EU.
Which OEMs matter most for a French app publisher? For Europe, Samsung and Xiaomi. For LATAM expansion, Samsung and Xiaomi. For MENA and Africa, Samsung, Xiaomi, and Transsion. For India and Southeast Asia, Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Transsion.
How does OEM advertising compare to Google, Meta, and Apple? OEM channels access inventory that the Google, Meta, and Apple stack does not reach: device setup, alternative app stores, and on-device placements. They are complementary, not competitive. Most clients run OEM alongside their existing channels.
How are OEM campaigns measured? Through your existing MMP. AVOW integrates with AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular, and Branch. Ad units are verified fraud-free by major MMPs.
What does an OEM campaign cost? Pricing varies by placement, geo, and OEM. Most campaigns run on CPI, CPC, or oCPC models. The reach calculator returns indicative pricing for your specific app and market.
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