There are two most popular questions:

1) Organic or paid ads?

2) If paid ads – which source is the best to start with?

Let me start from the beginning.

A few takes on organic growth

Even though I’m a paid-ads guy, I still can’t disagree that for many people, organic, whether it’s classic ASO or TikTok UGC, is the best choice at the start. Especially if you have no prior experience with paid ads, or if you don’t have free capital to test.

Organic is what you should start with. The main problems appear later, during scaling. Many developers get stuck at the stage of getting the first revenue and being unable to scale.

And the problem is not that there’s little traffic. No, to scale TikTok organic, you need to invest in operations: more creators, hiring VAs, people who will handle account farming, and so on.

TikTok organic is about clear processes that you must build. If you don’t want to discover years later that you’ve spent the last two years doing low-skill monkey work and earning only a couple thousand dollars per month, you need to move forward.

If you don’t want to grow into operations, the most obvious next step is launching paid ads.

I would say that as soon as your app gets its first revenue – and your life doesn’t depend on it – the only correct decision is to reinvest that revenue into paid ads.

And if you decide to do that, the second most popular question appears: which source should you choose?

  • Apple Ads

  • Meta Ads

  • Google Ads

  • TikTok Ads

These four ad platforms can cover all your needs for acquiring new users.

I’ll remove TikTok Ads from my short list because it’s the channel I have the least experience with, so my opinion won’t be very relevant. But I do have things to say about the other channels.

Google Ads is one of the simplest channels – at first glance. Almost ten years ago Google introduced the UAC format, which simplified launching mobile app campaigns. Basically, you specify the app link, the optimization goal, the country you want to target, and add a couple of ad assets. If you don’t have assets, Google will generate everything from your App Store or Google Play page.

There are a few problems:

  • difficult to control: you can’t remove poorly performing placements

  • behind the external simplicity are not-so-obvious optimizations and creative tests

  • usually, Google Ads performs much better for Android apps than for iOS apps

I’ve had different experiences with Google Ads. For Openchat, it was the first ad channel that enabled us to scale to $30k in monthly revenue quickly. But then the campaigns started behaving very strangely: all spend went to YouTube, with a 0.01% CTR and a terrible ROAS. At that time, we couldn’t fix this “bug” and I shifted my focus to Meta Ads.

Meta Ads

Meta Ads is a channel built to find the audience you need in nearly unlimited volumes. If you want to scale, you cannot avoid Meta Ads. For most B2C apps, questions about channel volume typically arise only after $500k-$1m in monthly spend.

Main disadvantages:

  • additional cost for creative production – and you need a lot of creatives

  • If your target CPA is not $1, you cannot spend very small amounts here. When launching Meta Ads, I usually assume my minimally workable daily budget will be $300–$500 – and most likely $1000+

  • Instability – in creatives, in the audience being attracted, in ROAS, in spend, etc. With Meta you always have to keep your hand on the pulse.

In Meta Ads, it’s incredibly easy to get an edge just through creatives. Actually, let me put it differently: creatives are the only thing that drives your performance on Meta.

And this is exactly where most teams and indie developers start struggling.
Because coming up with new, consistently performing creatives is hard. Really hard.

I’m not even talking about production – that part has gotten much easier today.
The real bottleneck is ideation. And AI still can’t help you much here. You still need a human, and you need to spend a lot of time on this part of the process.

Apple Ads

Apple Ads is my main channel right now.

Its main advantages:

  • you can start with a small budget

  • stable

  • easy to manage

  • doesn’t require investments in creatives

  • easy to learn

  • you work with users who already have intent to install an app similar to yours.

Main disadvantages:

  • hard to scale

  • expensive

Apple Ads looks much simpler than Meta or Google, which is why everyone tries to work with it – and why competition is higher. It’s harder to get an edge in Apple Ads; results usually cost more than on Meta, even with a well-performing creative.

However, in no other channel can you successfully launch with a $50–$100 daily budget; in Apple Ads, that’s possible.

And in almost no other source can you find a successful country+keyword combination and then forget about the campaign for a month without fearing you’ll start losing money.

TL;DR / Takeaway

Even though Apple Ads can be pretty expensive, for most developers without much marketing experience and with a small budget, it’s the best place to start.

If you’ve got some money to test and want to scale fast, then Meta Ads is the best choice.