Every performance marketer is fishing in the same two ponds.

Meta and Google. The duopoly. The channels where your bids compete against everyone else’s bids for the same finite pool of attention, and where the price of that attention only goes one direction.

The US cost per install for a mobile game hit roughly $4.90 in Q1 2026, up about a third in two years. iOS runs 30 to 50 percent higher than Android. And the supply of competitors is exploding: monthly subscription app launches grew from around 2,000 in early 2022 to over 14,700 by early 2026. More apps, same channels, same auction. You do the math on where CPI goes next.

There is a third pond. Most of your competitors are not fishing in it.

What OEM advertising actually is

OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer: the companies that make the phones. Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Huawei, Transsion.

These manufacturers control the device at a level no ad network can touch. The setup flow when a phone is first switched on. The default app store. The home screen. The folder of suggested apps. The “minus one” screen to the left of the home screen. The lock screen.

OEM advertising is the business of placing your app inside those surfaces. And it is not a rounding-error channel. It reaches roughly 1.85 billion daily active users across something like 86 percent of Android shipments globally. That is not a niche. That is most of the smartphones on earth outside Apple.

Why nobody in your competitive set is talking about it

Three reasons, and all three are why it works.

It is Android and emerging-markets heavy. If your entire UA worldview is built around iOS in North America, OEM looks like someone else’s channel. But that framing is exactly the blind spot. The growth is in India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and OEM is how you reach it at a price the duopoly cannot match.

It requires different plumbing. You cannot self-serve OEM the way you spin up a Meta campaign in an afternoon. It runs through device-level integrations and partners who have the manufacturer relationships. That friction is real, and it is precisely what keeps the auction uncrowded.

It has an image problem from its past. OEM used to mean crude preloads: junk apps stuffed onto a device that users deleted immediately. That is not what this is anymore, and the outdated reputation keeps cautious marketers away.

Three barriers to entry. Every one of them is a reason the marketers who do cross them find cheaper users on the other side.

How it works now

The channel matured. The formats today are performance instruments, not shovelware.

Dynamic Preloads. Powered by Google’s Play Auto Install, your app is downloaded in the background while a user sets up a new phone, but only if they select it, and it arrives as a genuine, updatable install. Users acquired this way tend to be sticky, because the app is present from the very first moment they use the device.

Alternative app store placements. Samsung Galaxy Store, Xiaomi GetApps, Huawei AppGallery. Real marketplaces with real intent, and a fraction of the ad density of Google Play.

On-device native placements. The minus-one screen, folder recommendations, lock screen surfaces. Contextual, full-screen-adjacent, and largely uncontested.

Frictionless install tech. On-device partners like Digital Turbine built system-level install flows that let a user go from ad to installed app without the full store detour, which lifts conversion and install velocity. The model keeps expanding: in mid-2026 Digital Turbine signed a deal with Orange to deploy alternative app distribution natively across the telecom’s European device base.

The number that matters

Apps running OEM campaigns consistently report cost per acquisition around 30 percent lower than traditional app store marketing.

Sit with that against the CPI trend. The duopoly is getting more expensive every quarter, driven by more competitors chasing the same inventory. OEM is 30 percent cheaper and structurally uncrowded, because the barriers that make it harder to access are the same barriers keeping your competitors out.

That is the whole thesis. In performance marketing, the channels everyone can access easily are the channels where margins get competed away. The edge is in the channel that takes some work to enter.

The limitations

OEM is not a duopoly replacement, and anyone selling it that way is overselling.

The measurement is different. You are operating in a heavily Android, heavily post-GAID environment, with Google’s Privacy Sandbox now in full enforcement and effective Android CPIs already up an estimated 15 to 20 percent as networks recalibrate. Your attribution has to be genuinely robust, because this is not a channel where you can lean on deterministic iOS-style matching.

The quality varies by partner and placement. Preload done badly is still the junk-install channel of its bad reputation. The difference between a sticky Dynamic Preload and a worthless forced install is entirely in how the campaign is structured and measured.

And it is operationally heavier. You need a partner with the manufacturer relationships and the attribution discipline to prove the installs are real and retained.

Which is the actual point. OEM rewards the marketer who measures properly and punishes the one who buys on install volume alone.

How to start

Do not reallocate half your budget on day one. Carve out a test, in a market where you already have Android traffic and want more of it. Insist on MMP-verified attribution from the first install, not partner-reported numbers. Judge it on D7 retention and D7 ROAS, never on CPI, because a cheap install that churns is not a win in any channel. Then compare the cohort against your Meta and Google users on the same metrics, honestly.

If the retention holds, you have found a pool of users at 30 percent below your blended CPA, in an auction your competitors have not entered yet.

This is the kind of channel SpinX is built to run: owned-and-operated supply, MMP-verified attribution, and a CPA model that means we are paid for outcomes, not for installs that look good and behave like nothing. We treat OEM the way it should be treated, as a performance channel measured to the same standard as everything else in your mix.

See how SpinX helps mobile advertisers scale UA beyond the duopoly at spinx.io.