Business of Apps Berlin 2025 (formerly App Promotion Summit Berlin) is a wrap. Held on November 27th, the twelfth edition of the event reached a new high gathering over 700 app marketing, growth, product, CRM, and revenue leaders at the iconic Hotel Adlon for a day of learning and networking.
Across six content stages and over fifty talks, executives from Omio, PAYBACK, Zasta, MyGroove, AutoScout24, Zalando, Flink, GameDuell, Zenjob, Toca Boca, and more presented to an audience that included representatives from Delivery Hero, Wolt, Vinted, Flo, Audible, Blinkist, Bolt, Spotify, Babbel, Kaspersky, Klarna, and HelloFresh, among others.
The summit’s dedicated networking app recorded over 3,300 new professional contacts made and 2,900 messages exchanged, facilitating in the process over 340 meetings.
As part of the event’s sustainability efforts, Business of Apps Berlin 2025 partnered with Treeapp to plant over 800 trees.
The first Business of Apps event
Business of Apps Berlin 2025 was the first event to be held under the Business of Apps brand after the recent rebrand bringing App Promotion Summit and Business of Apps under the same name and the same brand identity.
Since its inception in the early 2010s, the app industry has been all about promotion. Everything was installs and downloads; everyone wanted more users. The App Promotion Summit name made sense back then.
However, as the industry expanded, diversified, and began maturing, as privacy and personalisation began to dominate the discourse, and as users grew more savvy and their expectations increased, App Promotion Summit no longer made as much sense.
Today, the app industry is no longer about just promotion; app growth encompasses the full funnel — from user acquisition and retention to monetisation, subscriptions, and product development.
To reflect the ever-evolving industry, we changed the event’s name, but our commitment to bringing attendees high-quality content and networking opportunities as well as growing and adapting with the wider app industry remains the same. The rebrand will help us bring attendees more content tracks, larger venues, higher production values, and an even broader mix of leaders across marketing, growth, product, CRM, and revenue.
And this year’s numbers are already showing that the rebrand was more than worth it.
The attendees
In its 2025 iteration, Business of Apps Berlin welcomed a diverse audience, representing apps and brands across the spectrum, with 20.5% of attendees representing apps with 10M or more MAUs; 52.2% representing apps with 1M+ MAUs; and 73.6% representing apps with 100k or more MAUs.
The top app categories at the event were shopping, health and fitness, games, finance, utilities, travel, and education, with household names such as Deliver Hero, PAYBACK, Omio, Vinted, Flo, Blinkist, Bolt, Kaspersky, Babbel, Wolt, Spotify, Klarna, Freenow, Flink, Flix, Audible, Idealo, Zalando, Deezer, HelloFresh, Too Good To Go, and others among the audience.
The trends
The event was abuzz with the latest ideas and trends in the app industry, with a few key topics being on everyone’s mind.
AI, AI, AI, AI, AI
Rather unsurprisingly, one of the major topics of the day was AI and how to implement it in everything from marketing to product development.
Omio’s VP of Growth Norman Nielsen’s opening address set the stage in that regard, delivering a talk on the importance of thinking about AI not in terms of tools but in terms of frameworks. As he explained, successful app professionals should be having 100+ conversations with AI per day, not just a handful.
More importantly, however, AI should be adopted at company level and across all teams, rather than leaving individual teams or employees to choose the tools to use. He further stressed the importance of each company choosing the tools employees should use and setting clear guidelines on how and when they should be used. This top-down approach ensures that there are no silos within a company and will help, Nielsen argued, companies to save even more time and resources than the already recorded 20-25%.
Web monetisation
The recent rulings against Apple and Google have blown open the industry and revealed a slew of opportunities for those bold enough to reach for them and seize them. A lot has already been said about web monetisation, its advantages, its limitations, and such discussions inevitably made their way to the tables and session rooms at Business of Apps Berlin.
In his talk, FunnelFox’s CEO and Co-Founder Andrey Shakhtin broke down key benchmarks for web-to-app and outlined strategies for optimising web funnels.
In their dedicated workshop, Paddle’s CIO Andrew Davies and Perceptycs’s Founder and CEO Nathan Hudson tore down a series of web funnels (attendees were even encouraged to bring their own funnels for discussion) — from the great and good to the meh and bad ones — squeezing them dry for strategies and tactics everyone could use.
If you couldn’t join us on the day, you can watch recordings of all the sessions here.
The future
After twelve years of being the event to close the year for European app marketers, Business of Apps has grown so big that we are moving to a new venue.
Next year, Business of Berlin will return on November 12th at the Estrel Congress Center in the hip Neukölln district of Berlin.
You can find more information here.
