Discover the top Apple App Store apps that are likely abandoned yet still generated ad impressions in November 2025. These apps pose significant risks to the advertising ecosystem, including unaddressed security vulnerabilities, sophisticated ad fraud via hijacked traffic, and potential legal issues due to potential non-compliance with data protection and privacy laws, such as GDPR and COPPA.
Likely abandoned apps are defined as mobile applications that have not received an update in at least 3 years. Apps “with ads” are identified by the presence of measured open programmatic ad impressions.
Rankings are determined by app popularity, which considers total user review counts and estimated download volumes. Country rankings reflect the app developer’s country of registration. The findings are derived exclusively from Pixalate’s proprietary datasets.
Pixalate identifies the country of traffic using IP address data and geolocation signals.
Pixalate is a global platform for privacy compliance, ad fraud prevention, and data intelligence in the digital ad supply chain. Founded in 2012, Pixalate’s platform is trusted by regulators, data researchers, advertisers, publishers, ad tech platforms, and financial analysts across the Connected TV (CTV), mobile app, and website ecosystems. Pixalate is MRC-accredited for the detection and filtration of Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT).
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Disclaimer: The content of this page reflects Pixalate’s opinions with respect to the factors that Pixalate believes can be useful to the digital media industry. Any proprietary data shared is grounded in Pixalate’s proprietary technology and analytics, which Pixalate is continuously evaluating and updating. Any references to outside sources should not be construed as endorsements. Pixalate’s opinions are just that - opinion, not facts or guarantees.
Per the MRC, “'Fraud' is not intended to represent fraud as defined in various laws, statutes and ordinances or as conventionally used in U.S. Court or other legal proceedings, but rather a custom definition strictly for advertising measurement purposes. Also per the MRC, “‘Invalid Traffic’ is defined generally as traffic that does not meet certain ad serving quality or completeness criteria, or otherwise does not represent legitimate ad traffic that should be included in measurement counts. Among the reasons why ad traffic may be deemed invalid is it is a result of non-human traffic (spiders, bots, etc.), or activity designed to produce fraudulent traffic.”
