Growth · 8 min read
Which MMP should an indie developer actually use?
What a Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) does, why you need one before spending on TikTok or Google Ads, and how Tenjin, AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular and Branch compare on an indie budget.
The moment you spend your first dollar on TikTok Ads or Google App Campaigns, you inherit a problem: every ad network will happily take credit for your installs. TikTok says it drove 120 installs, Google says 150, and your App Store Connect dashboard shows… 180 total. Everyone is grading their own homework. A Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) exists to be the neutral referee.
What an MMP actually does
An MMP is an SDK plus a dashboard that sits between your app and every ad network you buy from. It receives the install and post-install events from your app, matches them against ad clicks and SKAdNetwork/AdAttributionKit postbacks, applies one consistent attribution logic, and tells you, per channel, campaign and creative, what an install really cost and what it's worth.
- Attribution: which network, campaign and creative actually drove each install, deduplicated so TikTok and Google can't both claim the same user.
- Cost aggregation: pulls spend from every network so you see CPI and ROAS in one place instead of five dashboards.
- Post-install events: trials, subscriptions, purchases forwarded back to the networks so their algorithms can optimize toward payers, not just installs.
- Fraud filtering: click spam and install farms are still a thing, especially on cheap traffic.
Why TikTok and Google Ads practically require one
TikTok, Google and Meta are self-attributing networks (SANs): they don't let you verify their claims from raw data. You integrate, they report their own numbers. Without an MMP in the middle, you have no independent count, no dedup between channels, and no way to send revenue events back in a consistent format. On iOS it's stricter still: since App Tracking Transparency, most attribution flows through Apple's SKAdNetwork (now evolving into AdAttributionKit), a privacy-preserving postback system that is genuinely painful to consume yourself. MMPs decode, aggregate and model those postbacks for you.
The contenders, from an indie's seat
The MMP market has a handful of serious players. They all do attribution, cost aggregation and SKAdNetwork; the differences that matter to a small studio are pricing, free-tier generosity, and how much setup pain you're signing up for.
| MMP | Best for | Free tier | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tenjin | Solo devs and small studios buying their first traffic. Covers TikTok, Google, Meta, Unity, AppLovin and the rest. | Genuinely usable, with cheap paid plans after it | Fewer enterprise features than the big two. |
| AppsFlyer | Teams scaling spend who want the deepest network integrations and the most polished SKAdNetwork tooling. | "Zero" tier, capped at a limited number of conversions | Pricing climbs fast once you scale. |
| Adjust | Funded teams that need enterprise-grade fraud prevention. Now part of AppLovin. | No meaningful free tier | Pricing and sales process aimed at funded teams, not weekend projects. |
| Singular | Marketers juggling many channels: MMP plus marketing analytics in one, with very strong cost aggregation. | Free tier available | Mid-market pricing beyond it. |
| Branch | Apps where links and web-to-app funnels are core to growth: attribution plus deep linking. | Free tier for linking | Less focused on pure paid UA measurement. |
How to choose without overthinking it
- 1Spending $0 on ads? You don't need an MMP yet. Spend the time on organic instead, starting with App Store keyword research.
- 2First campaigns on one or two networks? Tenjin. Free tier, indie pricing, and every network that matters for small budgets.
- 3Scaling past a few thousand dollars a month, or a publisher deal on the table? Trial AppsFlyer or Singular. The reporting depth starts paying for itself.
- 4Whatever you pick, integrate the SDK before you launch campaigns, and send your real revenue events from day one. Retro-fitting attribution is miserable.
The part MMPs don't show you: your organic installs
Here's what no MMP dashboard tells you: paid installs move your organic rankings. A burst of TikTok installs pushes you up the top charts and strengthens your keyword positions, and those better positions bring in free installs the MMP will simply file under "organic". In practice that's often an extra 20 to 40% on top of what you paid for, and it's the reason a campaign can be worth running even at break-even CPI.
To see that effect, you need the other half of the stack: track your keyword ranks daily while campaigns run, and watch how positions shift when spend starts and stops. That's exactly what AppCompete's Rank Tracker is for. Line up rank movements against your campaign dates, and you'll know whether your paid bursts are compounding into organic growth or evaporating on contact.
And if you have no ad budget at all? Skip ads. Organic is a complete acquisition channel on its own: pick the right keywords, rank for them, and collect free installs every day with no SDK, no campaigns and no MMP. That's the whole premise of the ASO playbook for indie developers. Ads can come later, once organic revenue is there to fund them.