🚨📢BREAKING NEWS: AppLovin Fingerprinting Exposed, Sensor Tower's M&A, Embracer's $192M Write-Down

Let me just show you a couple of the the things that you actually get. So, here's the Cypher and here is some of the things that you actually can get. So, anything from volume mute switch, things like that. And basically, it's about 50 things. You only report about 20.
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Two and a Half Gamers exclusive.
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Breaking news. Literally breaking. Hello everyone and welcome to another fantastic episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast and it's Friday today. So, we must do the news from this week finishing on the 22nd of May. So, I have three new stories like always we do on Fridays that I'm going to read, talk a little bit about and then hopefully you'll be caught up on industry news for the mobile industry. [music] So, the first news story I have for you today is the news that Sensor Tower has acquired Apptopia Sensor Tower announced today

the acquisition of Apptopia, a service for mobile app market intelligence that will serve as Sensor Tower's new small and medium business SMB offering. Founded in 2016, Apptopia provides competitive intelligence to SMB organization and is best known for its market research capabilities and insights into the mobile gaming ecosystem. With the acquisition of Apptopia, Sensor Tower furthers its commitment to provide best-in-class to the entire app ecosystem for a small uh including for small mobile gaming studios and indie developers. Quotation, "Today marks an exciting chapter in the evolution of Sensor Tower's mobile app intelligence." says Oliver Yeh, co-founder and CEO of Sensor Tower. "We look forward to bringing together the Apptopia and Sensor Tower teams, technology, products, and deliver an SMB offering that will support all stages of the mobile app and gaming ecosystem. Sensor Tower is actually sponsor here.

We use Sensor Tower all the time and it's a fantastic service that we rely on quite heavily. One of the issues is it's very expensive. I guess that this kind of makes sense to use AppLovin as a funnel to get more users. I guess this also kind of keeps them kind of firmly in control of this whole market. But anyway, congratulations both AppLovin and Sensor Tower for this acquisition. So, I'm actually going to share a screen here for this second story because it's one that's a bit more closer to hearts. In MySpace and it's actually reported on the 15th of May on bushodi.com and it's some kind of white hat hacker that's actually broken AppLovin's mediation cipher protocol. I just read the introduction here and then I'll explain a little bit what's going on. We're probably going to have to do an episode just on this alone because it's quite spicy

if this is proven to be true. So,
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title is I broke AppLovin's mediation cipher protocol. I broke the cipher AppLovin wraps around its ad mediation traffic and decrypted several thousand bid request captured on my consented mobile traffic research panel. The conclusion is straightforward. The encrypted bid request carries enough data to determine deterministically re-identify the same iPhone across apps from different publishers. Even when a user denies ATT, that payload reaches AppLovin plus 12 downstream app networks on every banner load every 30 seconds for as long as a user is in an app. The assumption is that ATT is the only way to deterministically identify a user is wrong. Fingerprinting the device works just [music] as well. So, a lot of big words in that. I'm going to explain a little bit and then probably we're going to do an episode on this in length because there's quite a lot of interesting things here. But this kind

of confirms what I've been saying for so long that iOS every ad network in the industry is doing a fingerprinting. You don't have to be crazy not to. But essentially what this white hat black hat white hat, I don't know what they how to call them, does is essentially he has broken the mediation cipher and basically found out that if you call the right things that you can actually get access to about 50 parameters just screen size, OS, language, the operating system. And these 50 things together if you have them, you can actually build a pretty good fingerprint [music] of what a user is. The fact that you can have 50 different settings on these things means that you can actually pretty much build I don't know, like audiences based on all of this data, which means that you pretty much have just as good of a tracking thing as the IDFA. The interesting thing here is that according to this developer, what he's

kind of saying is that it's there for anyone to grab it and basically it's not being done by one or two of these networks in particular, it's being done by all of them. I don't know if this is true or not. This is just some person what he's written. But if this is proven true, it's quite interesting because essentially that means why we have such good performance right now on iOS, right? We're going to dive more into [music] this for sure. I just thought it was really interesting to actually bring this up. Let me just show you a couple of the the things that you actually get. So, here's the cipher and here is some of the things that you actually can get. So, anything from volume, mute switch, things like that. And basically it's about 50 things. He only reports about 20 in this report. But essentially what you can get is the OS version, the font, the volume, the mute switch, and the IDFV, a bunch of interesting stuff. And this will probably be enough to

ensure that you always get high eCPMs and high tracking on these users. Hoping this gets confirmed. Would be super interesting to find out more. Let's see what Apple does on this or if they even have a response or if it just gets ignored like Apple has been doing for the last couple of years because my theory here is that essentially Apple will lose a lot of money if they start policing fingerprinting because then essentially they'll have less downloads and less targeters or less people buying IAPs, all right? Also, since every network, according to this study, means that if Apple were to take action, they would have to take action against [music] all of them, right? And keep in mind that they have their own Apple Search Ads, which would mean that this would be an interesting [music] court case cuz then what would happen is essentially Apple will say that you can't do tracking unless you're Apple. So, very interesting story. We'll cover this in depth a bit more. So, third and final story, and this is about a Swedish

company called Embracer, and it's essentially they did their first reporting now after the divestiture of Easy Easybrain last year for 1.2 billion to Miniclip. So, they've actually written down their mobile arm by nearly 200 million. So, I read here from Neil Long on from MobileGamer.biz, "Swedish roll-up firm Embracer wrote down the value of down the value of its mobile business by 192 million in its latest financial report [music] and has said it has prudent expectations ahead for the segment overall. The Q1 full year results showed a dramatic drop in mobile net game sales following the sale 1.2 billion sale of Easybrain to Miniclip. The top mobile earners at the owner at the owner of Crazy Labs, Thinking Ape, Deca, Sled Surfers, Glow, Lamour, Flop Rocket, and Party in My Dorm, the company [music] said. They contributed a net sales of 682 million Swedish crowns. That's about 72 or 73 million dollars, which is actually

down 28% year-on-year, but that's actually due to Easy Brains divestiture. So, if you actually remove Easy Brain from the picture, the organic growth in Embracer's full portfolio in Q1 was 2%. Uh EBITDA is up by about 4% and reading between the lines here, right? Like, what's actually happened is [music] Embracer has sold, of course, Easy Brain, which was their crown jewel in their in their gaming crown, right? And now they have about 1.2 billion they're going to be spending. Should assume that Embracer will go on a buying spree and actually buy it because that's essentially what Embracer's business [music] model demands them to do. They need to keep buying companies to make sure the stock price goes up. And if you see here what the market is actually pricing in for Embracer, uh you can see that the share price since April is actually up from about 50 or 45 crowns to 68 crowns. So,

year-over-year is actually down 20%, but what the market is telling you to do what the market is telling you here is they think that they [music] essentially will make another big purchase that will boost the stock price, and that's how to look at this because Embracer has to keep buying companies to make sure that everything makes sense in their business model. So, quite interesting to watch this. That's it for our three stories from this [music] week. Thank you so much for stopping by, and we will be seeing you soon, I hope. Bye-bye.