To our partners, advertisers, and the wider industry,
As many of you are aware, our iOS and Android apps were removed this week from the App Store and Google Play following media coverage that contained a number of inaccurate and misleading claims about our business. We are actively working with both Apple and Google to resolve this, and are confident in a positive outcome.
Articles like this show that there is still confusion in the wider public about how the general space of rewarded user acquisition works and the actual value apps like Freecash or Almedia deliver to users and advertisers. Let us clarify these points:
What Rewarded User Acquisition Is
We believe that Rewarded User Acquisition is a new way of advertising that turns advertisement into engagement, by rewarding users for engaging post acquisition.
Rewarded User Acquisition can be considered an evolution and combination of advertising, loyalty and cashback: users benefit because they earn real rewards for playing games, completing surveys, and shopping through cashback offers; advertisers benefit because those users have a higher engagement rate. Our model is not about simply acquiring users, but engaging them. Over the years, this developed and led to a significant allocation of advertising budgets and market share of mobile advertising towards this category, driven both by advertiser and user preference alike.
On the business model and Almedia: we are a Berlin-founded advertising technology company with over 150 employees across five offices worldwide. Our revenue comes from advertisers, primarily mobile game publishers and retailers, who pay us when users take those meaningful actions within their apps, such as reaching a level or making a purchase. We share that revenue with our users through rewards.
We have paid out over $300 million to our users over the years — $300 million of advertising budget going straight back into the pockets of consumers. Our iOS app holds a 4.7-star rating from over 150,000+ App Store reviews while our Google Play app sits at 350,000+ and a 4.5-star average rating.
In 2026 alone, 19 million new users joined Freecash, and the iOS app reached the No. 2 position in the US App Store. 70M+ users worldwide trust our platform and flagship product, Freecash.
Our Data Practices
Almedia is a technology and data-driven company. As is standard for almost all apps on today’s marketplace, we collect user data to improve our product, streamline user experience, and ensure we match users with the right offers. This is a common practice in advertising. Additionally, we track user’s progression within our advertiser’s apps, which is essential for our rewarding system. We are based in Germany and fully compliant with GDPR, the strictest privacy regulations that exist on a governmental level.
Almedia is not a data broker. Our privacy policy makes explicit exactly what we do and do not collect. You can read more about how we approach data security on our blog.
One of our services is market research surveys. To match users with relevant studies, we ask demographic pre-qualification questions. Users voluntarily opt into surveys and pre-qualification questions and can skip them at any time. We do not and will never sell data. We do not collect more data than needed to deliver our services.
Following the reports about collecting sensitive data earlier in 2026, we updated our privacy policy to remove broad legal language that could be misinterpreted. We have not and do not collect sensitive user data.
We welcome scrutiny of our data practices and are happy to walk any partner through them in detail.
How We Promote Freecash
As a consumer facing app, we heavily invest in marketing to acquire users.
Freecash reached the top of the App Store through substantial, sustained investment in paid user acquisition. We operate with an annual advertising budget of $300+ million across all major channels, including Google, Meta, DSPs, television, influencer partnerships.
Ultimately, this budget is indirectly coming from our advertisers’ ad spend. They include some of the most sophisticated performance marketers in the world: mobile gaming studios that allocate budgets purely based on measurable returns. At the scale we operate, sustained investment of this size only happens when performance is genuine.
As such, our operating model prohibits paid reviews, and we do not use bots to drive traffic, downloads, or engagement. Doing so would directly go against our performance-based model, which is entirely built on real user activity playing games or purchasing products to generate value for our advertisers.
When you acquire millions of real users and those users have a genuinely good experience the result is exactly what our data shows: rapid growth in downloads, high engagement, and a consistently strong review profile. There is no mystery to our growth. It is the direct, measurable outcome of significant marketing investment combined with a product that 70 million people have chosen to use.
As one of our acquisition channels, we also operate an affiliate marketing program. Earlier this year, within the affiliate program, some third-party affiliates created TikTok ads with exaggerated or misleading claims. We apologize to our users for the confusion and disappointment this may have caused. When we identified the specific ads in question, we had them removed immediately and fully supported the platforms' decisions to take them down.
Going forward we will make sure to prevent this from happening again. We have established Partner Advertising Guidelines (freecash.com/en/policies/partner-advertiser-policy) with approved messaging and a list of strictly prohibited claims. We are actively monitoring affiliate output and preventing deceptive advertising, and we are continuing to invest in improving these systems.
Our App Store History
Rewarded platforms have had a complicated relationship with app store guidelines, which historically did not account for how modern reward-based models operate. Our original iOS app was removed from the App Store in 2024. Mid 2025, Apple updated its guidelines and added a paragraph to explicitly permit acceptance of our model:
3.2.2.(x) Apps must not force users to rate the app, review the app, download other apps, or other store-related actions in order to access functionality, content, or use of the app. Apps may otherwise incentivize users to take specific actions within apps (e.g. completing a level, watching an ad).
Following that update, we acquired an existing rewards app, transitioned its user base, and rebuilt it from the ground up with an entirely new experience, reward system, and proprietary technology. As outlined by the guidelines, Freecash does not incentivize installs, but instead specific actions within other apps.
Our goal is to be fully compliant with any app stores, which we see as key partners for further growth.
Looking Forward
Rewarded user acquisition is one of the fastest-growing categories in mobile advertising, and for good reason. It aligns incentives between users, advertisers, and platforms in a way that few other models do, and genuinely improves the advertising economy for everyone. Users get rewarded for their time and attention while advertisers get high-intent engaged users.
We are not perfect. We are a fast-growing company, and fast growth comes with mistakes that need correcting. But we are building something that genuinely works for the millions of users who choose to use Freecash every day, and for the hundreds of advertisers who trust us with their budgets.
The growth potential of our industry and our company is immense and we have been working very hard in the last years to build a company that lasts. I’m looking forward to what we can achieve in the next years.
I also want to mention that I am very grateful for all of the support and encouragement we have received from our partners and the industry.
We are committed to operating transparently, improving where we fall short, and continuing to grow this industry in a way that benefits everyone involved.
If you have questions about anything raised here, our team is available at press@almedia.co. We will respond promptly and on the record.
— Moritz