Black Friday 2025 represents a shift in how shoppers discover, evaluate, and engage with brands using their mobile devices; it isn’t simply another peak shopping period. This year, there will be a large number of mobile devices available to shoppers that are actively seeking out the best price offers by using apps, through content-driven interactions with the brand’s platforms and ultra-personalised shopping experiences. Shoppers are using mobile devices for their journey towards identifying offers, discovering new products and brands, and engaging them through the decision-making process of purchasing. Globally, around 69% of Black Friday purchases in 2024 were made on mobile devices. The relationship between these mobile experiences and consumer trust, importance, speed, and relevance is an important consideration when looking to grow beyond Black Friday. As privacy-first growth becomes the norm, insights supported by solutions like Apptrove help you understand these shifts more clearly. Your mobile strategy must evolve in concert with the behaviours and needs of consumers on mobile.
How Mobile Marketers Should Prepare for Black Friday 2025
Black Friday 2025 is no longer just an after-hours shopping event; it will be a comprehensive mobile-first shopping extravaganza that begins several weeks prior. Your customers do not have to wait until midnight to find the best deals because they will use mobile applications to do their research, compare prices, and keep track of their favourite discounts long in advance of when you start your advertising campaigns. This new consumer mindset means you will now have shoppers who have high expectations and are very selective when shopping, as they become tired of searching for deals early during the holiday shopping season.
Customers now expect mobile apps to deliver exclusive promotions in the app environment. More and more customers are checking their favourite discount sites and applications to find the best deals. As the use of AI for personalisation continues to increase, consumers will expect your app to have all the information about their preferences the minute they open your app. Also, mobile devices drove about 79% of all site traffic on Black Friday 2024 — showing that mobile often serves as the entry point for consumers’ shopping journeys. If you want to go deeper into pre-holiday install trends and user motivation, explore this breakdown on mobile app installs for a richer context.
The Impact of Black Friday 2025 on Mobile User Behaviour – What You Can Do About It
Mobile has become an important part of consumers’ purchasing decisions. Today, consumers are starting their purchasing journey by searching for the products and offers they will be purchasing on a mobile phone. Many shopping journeys are taking place through social media channels on mobile devices, and shoppers are able to quickly compare prices for any product they would like to purchase, regardless of which country they live in or the location of the retailer.
According to a 2025 industry estimate, global mobile-commerce (m-commerce) sales are expected to reach US$2.51 trillion — accounting for about 59% of all global e-commerce retail sales in 2025.
In addition to the above, users are also experiencing the “micro-moment” in today’s society. The “micro-moment” is when a user makes a single decision in a very short amount of time by checking the price of a product, reading through user reviews and feedback, or viewing an offer. Users are making decisions quicker than before, with shorter attention spans and higher expectations of receiving personalised service. Users who are part of Generation Z and millennials tend to have more than one app on their mobile device, and they will typically switch between them frequently because of their habit of finding the best prices first.
When trying to understand how users will continue to use your app after they install it, it becomes as important as getting the installation itself. You can evaluate the depth of users’ early sessions, how often users return to your app, and the way in which users interact with your app to determine whether they are merely visiting your app to browse products or whether they are actively buying products.
The Importance of Developing a Smarter Black Friday 2025 Strategy for Your Application
The Black Friday 2025 event is occurring during a period when most consumers will not shop via desktop or physical retail stores, but rather exclusively through mobile devices. More importantly, this shift means that consumers will be purchasing and/or finding products completely through their mobile devices rather than any other means and will have to perform numerous tasks on their mobile device to complete a purchase. Because of this change, it becomes critical that you provide your customers with an experience that allows for a seamless purchasing path from discovery through to completion on their mobile device. In addition, while the traditional ways of tracking users and attributing purchases have all but disappeared due to these changing privacy norms, providing privacy-friendly tracking solutions has become a requirement in order to measure how well you’re converting customers. Without accurate attribution, it will become increasingly difficult to determine what is truly driving conversions.
Data Fragmentation Creates Additional Challenges for Measurement Users’ movement between App Stores, Ads and In-App Content creates gaps in the measurement process which makes it increasingly difficult to identify which campaigns are actually moving the needle for a brand. One way to resolve these gaps and reduce the friction created in “high intent” moments is to maintain cross-platform consistency, such as by ensuring that there is alignment between an offer, message and path.
This is why things like Deep Linking, Audience Segmentation, Retargeting Post First Purchase and Personalised Offers are essential during Black Friday as they allow for the smooth transition of users from interest into action (especially when attention spans are at their shortest during peak deal cycles). Additionally, with growing dependence on privacy for measurement on iOS, it is imperative for marketers to build a strong attribution base using SKAN Analytics.
Here are Some Things You can Prioritise to Maximise Your Installs and Revenue on Black Friday 2025
While we know that customers are always impatient, during Black Friday, they are even more impatient than usual. They not only want the lowest prices available but also expect them to be delivered in an instant, with zero friction or confusion, and with no extra steps required. Therefore, the groundwork you complete before Black Friday 2025 will significantly affect your overall performance.
Prior to the Black Friday 2025 rush, most companies should focus on creating a solid creative strategy so that their visuals and messaging stand out in an environment where each company is competing for the same split seconds of attention from consumers. Companies need to optimise their store listing by having up-to-date screenshots, obvious descriptions of their products/services, and a clear value proposition that resonates with today’s mobile-first shoppers.
Finally, a company should ensure that they are technically ready for installs; anything less than this may hinder their ability to convert high-intent users immediately before they convert. Anything that causes issues, such as slow loading times, crashes, or missing deep links, means that a company is losing high-intent customers at the moment that they are ready to buy.
When an event peaks, all shifts to live-action account for actions that take place in real time. You will want to pay attention to signals generated by devices, so that you can understand the movement of various demographic groups through your funnel and analyse how often they return or engage with your app to determine whether they are continuing to shop on your app or are only close to making their purchase. According to Insider Intelligence, the number of app downloads during the holiday season has increased by almost ten per cent year over year, indicating the increasingly intense competition within the install race during this period.
After the flurry subsides, it’s what’s retained after that that matters, as opposed to what’s been acquired. Therefore, retention, trends for uninstalling and how users use your app within the first several days will provide the most information to potential users as to whether your product is providing the value they expected, or if they only took action based on a promotional offer that was available for a limited time.
Long-Term Growth through Black Friday 2025
Historically, Black Friday has been viewed as a major one-time spike on the metrics; however, it is now viewed as a gateway into the funnel. The measurable increase in traffic that the holiday provides is not only due to discounts but also acts as an introduction to a brand-new customer and how they evaluate an app. The long-term success of your business will not be predicated on install metrics but on how your customers feel when they use the app, their experiences within the app, and if they choose to keep the app on their home screen.
After the rush of Black Friday 2025 is over, the true work begins. After analysing the historical data patterns to find retention signals and analysing the data through a privacy-first lens, your best customers will emerge. You will know who engaged with your app, how often, and why. After reflecting on these insights, you will create a growth strategy that will extend well beyond the holiday excitement and be based on data derived from user behaviour, rather than assumptions.
If you would like to explore how privacy-friendly measurement can be used to support long-term growth after Black Friday, get in touch with us.
FAQs
1. Why is Black Friday 2025 considered a mobile-first shopping event?
As people use apps for researching, comparing and purchasing items online, they are more likely to utilize Mobile Shopping in their Black Friday 2025 purchases. Mobile devices represent the primary access point for consumers to take advantage of Black Friday Deals, and as such have created a new standard of Consumer Behaviour/Consumer Expectation around Convenience, Speed of Delivery and Personalization.
2. How can brands leverage AI during Black Friday 2025?
AI can be used by brands to provide personalised recommendations, price optimisation, and prediction about your customer preference. During Black Friday 2025, AI insights will enable brands to deliver timely offers, reduce customer friction and create a seamless mobile shopping experience that increases customer engagement and conversions.
3. Who benefits most from the shift to mobile shopping on Black Friday 2025?
Millennial consumers and GenZ consumers have more opportunities to compare prices via multiple applications and potentially obtain a greater deal due to frequent consumer use of mobile devices. These tech-centric shoppers will also have instant access to targeted mobile promotional activity throughout the Black Friday 2025 shopping period.
4. What challenges do marketers face during Black Friday 2025?
The marketer’s challenge to address privacy restrictions, a fragmented user journey and increased consumer expectations is compounded for Black Friday 2025 by the need for precise attribution, seamless deep linking, and quick-loading apps to turn potential high-intent customers into actual sales while maintaining purchasing momentum.
5. Why is retention important after Black Friday 2025?
Long-term growth can be ensured by retention, which allows businesses to grow past the black Friday surge. While Black Friday 2025 brings on new customers, by studying customer engagement, app usage and repeat purchases, businesses can convert their one-time customer into returning and loyal customers.
