🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: AppLovin Prints $2.2B (84% Margin), Apple Blames Gaming, UK King & DarkWar Ads ban

Apple says it has now topped 1.5 billion subscribers for its services business up from one billion in January 2025. However, this segment of Apple's business which includes Apple Store, Apple Care, music, video and cloud services was the only miss in what was otherwise a record-breaking quarter for the company's hardware sales.
Two and a half Gamers exclusive. [music]
Breaking news. Literally [music] breaking.
Hello everyone and welcome to another fantastic episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast. It's me again today and yeah back after what feels like forever and again doing the news because it's Friday. So today I'm going to read through two three news articles from this last week that I think are important for our mobile gaming

ecosystem and then we'll finish off by doing the weather which I always call the top charts for Sensor Tower in gaming. Starting first with probably the biggest news of this week reported here by Vicki Blake from mobilegamerbiz.com is of course AppLovin and how they blew the doors off their earnings in Q3 2026. They posted a record revenue of 2.2 billion in Q3 up 55 which is crazy a year on year. I read here AppLovin's revenue grew by 55% year on year to a record 2.2 billion in Q3 2026. Net income rose 72% to 1.4 billion in three months to September 30th according to the company's results giving it a 66% net income margin and adjusted EBITDA was up 59% 1.8 billion, a 84%

For the first nine months of the year, AppLovin has made 5.9 billion in revenue, up 56% and 3.9 in net income from continuing operations, which is up 68% The company's forecasting Q4 revenue between 2.3 to 2.4 billion with adjusted EBITDA of two to two point The Lovin brought back shares in this quarter at a cost of 1.4 billion and and its board has approved a further 3.2 billion in buybacks, taking the total authorization back to 3.6 Speaking of the company's earnings call, Adam Foroughi said AppLovin's gaming business grew nearly 50% year-over-year, re-accelerating the right alongside the rollout of a new generated generation of its ad models, which have only so far been partially deployed.

So I'm just going to show you this little chart here, which is incredible, that shows the increasing [music] revenue growth of AppLovin. Yeah, they can't be stopped. That's all I have to say that. I think I'm going to stop reading here, but basically AppLovin has not really missed a quarter in the last couple of years. They just keep on growing and growing and growing and basically what what else to say, right? With the dominance that they have on the MAX mediation, they hold such an advantage in this whole ecosystem that yeah, you can only expect them to grow even further. You don't bet against AppLovin. All right, so moving on to the next story, which is quite interesting, and this is from TechCrunch, Sarah Perez and it's titled that Apple says gaming slowed down and App Store changes hurt services growth. I read Apple says it has now topped 1.5 billion subscribers for its services

business, up from 1 billion in January 2025. However, this segment of Apple's business which includes Apple Store, Apple Care, music, video and cloud services was the only miss in what was otherwise a record-breaking quarter for the company's hardware sales. In Apple's fiscal third quarter, the company reported 30 billion in services revenue falling short of the 31 billion in Wall Street analyst had expected combined with a miss in China. Apple stock tumbled 4% in after hours hours trading. When asked to dive into what led to the decline in services revenue, Apple CFO Kevin Pakash pointed to several factors. Most notable, however, were the impacts on Apple's cash cow, the App Store. One factor contributing to the App Store's performance in the quarter was the slowdown in mobile gaming. It also called out the App Store business model

changes in certain countries. Yes, is hop ahead a bit again, but basically Apple here, right, what they're essentially doing is saying that gaming is slowing down on the App Store. And that's not just not what I'm seeing when I'm around conferences what's actually happening. What I am hearing and what I am seeing is that more and more mobile gaming companies are now basically doing a large portion of transactions off platform to not be subjugated to the 30% Apple or Google fees. So I don't think it's gaming slowing down. I think it's gaming electing to basically go off platform and run a lot of their payments outside of the Apple ecosystem to save money. [music] So that's quite interesting. That's what I think and that's what I kind of see happening in the industry. But let's move to our third and final

story before moving on to the weather. This is also from Mobile Gamer Biz and also [music] reported by Vicky Blake and it basically says that uh the UK advertising watchdog ASA bans misleading mobile game ads from King, Scopely, [music] Dark World uh Dark World Survival publisher and more. So the UK's advertising watchdog has banned mobile game ads from King, Scopely, Dark World publisher Omeilio and Vistrex for misleadingly representing their gameplay. The Advertising Standards Authority published four rulings today as part of a wider crackdown on misleading gameplay in mobile ads. All of these ads were seen on April 28th, 2026. This is already ridiculous. I can tell already, but anyway, let's keep reading. Mobile ads game ads must give people an accurate impression of the gameplay that they can expect and mustn't mislead them with scenarios or features that aren't

representative of the actual game, said ASA senior investigations executive Freddy Alcock Alcock. Interesting name. Anyway, uh the most serious ruling was against Singapore-based Omeilio, which uh publishes zombie strategy games Dark World Survival and Last World Last Z Survival Shooter. Three Google ads for Dark World Survival showed looting, shooting zombies, driving an armed survival train, all rendered in highly produced graphics. The ASA found that these were non-interactive story sequences rather than gameplay and that the game's actual graphics differed materially. Yeah, it goes on to saying here like which ads were banned from the different parts. Uh for example, one ad got banned from King's Heroes Farm Saga uh because it wasn't actual gameplay. The interesting thing here, right, is that the ads that they banned here can't appear again in their current [music]

form. This kind of news shows you how out of touch government regulatory bodies are which are which are actually happening in mobile. So right now, large-scale studios like King, Scopely, and these guys, they're running somewhere usually between 12 to 35,000 new ads every [music] month, right? So the fact, and usually you're running that for maybe, yeah, a couple of days to maximum a week, right? So the fact that they're banning specific ads really doesn't do anything and it doesn't really get to the heart of what the issue is. Also, the UK's portion of IPs and revenue for all these companies is quite small. So all that does is kind of just changes where they show the ads and [music] yeah, this pretty much just doesn't do anything. So quite interesting to see. I guess it's like a drop in the bucket, if even that, maybe a drop in the ocean. Yeah, this does absolutely nothing. So

great job wasting time. All right. Finally, before we end today, I wanted to show the top charts on the App Store for yesterday, Thursday. So let's look here for MiDoku is topping the US charts for games, followed by Blockout by Grand Games and Magic Sort by Grand Games. Two top uh three games for uh Grand Games on the App Store. That 's amazing. Congratulations to them. Also, we have Google Play. Let's look here. MiDoku as well topping. Well done Okever. Block Blast, Rotate Rings and Roblox and then Royal Smash by Cipher Games. So that's quite interesting as well to see there. None of the Smash games were actually in the top on the iOS App Store anymore. Super interesting. First time that's happened in quite a while. All right. I think we can end it here for the news for this week. This has been another fantastic news reading. I

think next week we'll probably do the Unity earnings as well because they come out late on Thursday, so I won't have time to read them today. But thank you so much for stopping by.