Publishers say product capacity, not ambition, is the app blocker

Half of publishers say product team capacity is their number one blocker to growing app audiences, yet 80 percent say apps will be "very" important to their business over the next year, according to Pugpig's 2026 Media App Report, drawn from 440-plus apps across 140 publishers. The engagement is concentrated in a small cohort: 20 percent of monthly active users account for three-quarters of all app sessions. Subscriber retention is rated the single most important metric by 70 percent of publishers, but nearly half admit they currently cannot measure it as a KPI. Pugpig CEO Jonny Kaldor puts the opportunity plainly: there is "significant value" in "deepening the relationship with the most-engaged readers," adding that as AI changes how audiences discover content, "apps are becoming the most reliable channel" to build direct, measurable reader relationships. Games, video and audio are the levers: users who play games open their app 2.7x more often, video watchers spend 3.3x more time, audio listeners 2.5x.

The crux

The constraint on publisher apps is not demand but product resourcing and a measurement gap, so the publishers who win are those who instrument retention properly and convert anonymous users rather than just shipping an app shell.

Sell-side read

The app is now the highest-yield surface you own because it is the one place AI discovery cannot disintermediate the relationship. The half of the audience that is anonymous non-subscribers is your cheapest conversion target, and push is underperforming because most sessions are direct opens.

Watch

Whether publishers close the retention-measurement gap before next year's report, since you cannot optimise the metric you cannot see.