Adtech firm AppLovin on Wednesday confirmed it has shuttered a mobile software product that was allegedly enabling downloads of apps onto user devices without consent.
A company spokesperson said in a statement shared with ADWEEK that AppLovin eliminated Array last quarter. The product enabled device makers like Samsung and service carriers like T-Mobile to surface on-device app recommendations and allow seamless direct app downloads.
The spokesperson said AppLovin decided to close down Array, a move first reported by Bloomberg, because the product “was not economically viable.”
However, chief financial officer Matthew Stumpf last year cited Array, alongside a handful of other parts of the business, as key to AppLovin’s revenue growth. The LinkedIn profile of former AppLovin product lead Jia-Hong Xu previously claimed that Array’s direct download ad function was “the company’s top revenue driver.”
AppLovin has reassigned workers on the Array team to its burgeoning e-commerce business, the spokesperson said.
Founded in 2012, AppLovin helps developers monetize mobile apps with ads. Though it’s become a Wall Street darling—with a market cap swelling to around $207 billion—it’s faced growing scrutiny this year, due in large part to a smattering of short seller reports in the spring and summer. These reports, from firms including Fuzzy Panda Research, Sakura Research, and Culper Research, detailed unsubstantiated allegations ranging from “deceptive, predatory” advertising to artificially inflated revenue through round-tripping practices.
Array’s closure comes on the heels of new research this week published by ad fraud researcher and former Harvard professor Ben Edelman—who also has a short position on AppLovin. Edelman has unearthed instructions within AppLovin source code that he says appear to instigate autonomous downloads of external mobile apps when users engage with an in-app ad powered by AppLovin.
He also observed what he described to ADWEEK as “very unusual idiosyncrasies,” including language indicating a five-second countdown timer linked to an ‘autoInstallDelayMs’ instruction that appears to be designed for triggering app installs.
Edelman also compiled 208 posts from users complaining that apps were appearing on their devices even though they didn’t believe they had consented to downloading them. Some complaints, reviewed independently by ADWEEK, indicated that these apps automatically downloaded after users clicked on an ad, when trying to exit an ad, and even in cases where users claimed they did not touch their screens at all. Edelman believes unwanted downloads stem from the Array product, though the allegation is unproven.
Edelman has conducted tests on a variety of his own devices as well, but has never witnessed an automatic app install via an AppLovin ad in these tests, he said.