Aman Sareen on taking a brand-new iOS Retargeting product from launch to #1 on the open internet for iOS gaming remarketing in the AppsFlyer Performance Index (2026 Edition).
Some milestones you plan for. This one we built for.
In the AppsFlyer Performance Index (2026 Edition), RZR ranked #1 on the open internet for iOS gaming remarketing. Put simply: outside the walled gardens, nobody re-engages iOS players better.
RZR launched our iOS Retargeting product about a year ago. A year before this edition, we weren't on the iOS board at all. Under the Aarki name, we had placed on Android boards before. iOS was a different story.
I've been in adtech long enough to know an index is a snapshot, not a trophy you get to keep. But I'll be honest with you: this one matters to me. Here's why.
Retargeting is the most demanding discipline in performance marketing. Period. It asks the toughest question in our business: did your ad bring that user back, or were they coming back anyway?
Now put that question on iOS. Since Apple's App Tracking Transparency, most iOS users opt out of tracking. No device ID, very little signal, and a lot of people in our industry quietly decided iOS retargeting was dead.
Our clients needed it to work. So we made it work.
We re-engage lapsed users without device identifiers, using privacy-safe, non-PII signals and modeling. When a user has opted in, we use that. When they haven't, our models still find them. Every impression is priced at bid time on what that specific user is likely to be worth.
And we don't get a vote in the AppsFlyer Index. Nobody does. That's exactly why it means something.
To understand how a product gets to the top in a year, you have to go back to the start of 2023.
Within the first 7 days of my tenure as CEO, we shut down sales and marketing completely and put every dollar into product and technology. People thought we were crazy. Maybe a little. But you can't sell your way out of a product problem.
A turnaround is harder than starting a company from scratch. It's not for the faint of heart. Here's what we rebuilt.
We own the machines. We moved our stack onto four owned and operated data centers that process more than 6 million ad queries per second, running on GPUs we own instead of renting cloud. I like to say on-prem is the new cloud, and I mean it. Owning the hardware enables us to make more decisions faster and every model we train more efficient. That's what lets us run experiments every day instead of every quarter. But infrastructure means nothing if it doesn't create value for clients.
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We built our own brain. We replaced our legacy models with a proprietary neural network that predicts which users are most likely to return and spend. It runs behind every single bid.
Here's the part people miss. We rebuilt everything, but we didn't start from zero. That neural network is trained on more than 10 years of performance data from Aarki: a decade of bids, installs, purchases and re-engagements across gaming and beyond. New architecture, long memory. Most companies have one or the other. Fresh technology with no history makes for weak models. Deep history on old technology means you can't use it. We got to have both, and that's a big reason RZR’s iOS Retargeting got good so fast.
Hiring for a turnaround filters for a certain kind of person. Nobody joins a company in our position for the logo. They join because they believe they can build something. Those are the people we went after.
Over three years we brought in world-class leaders across every function: product, engineering, data science, sales, client success and marketing. We built A product and engineering organization (product, eng, ML) with some of the sharpest minds in our industry. Today, about 85% of RZR joined in the last three years.
It's the best team I have ever assembled in my life. This ranking belongs to them. Especially the engineers who were rebuilding the underlying technology while the plane was still in the air.
Here's what I'm proudest of. iOS Retargeting isn't a one-off. It's one launch in a pattern:
That’s six major launches in three years, and we ship improvements every quarter on top of that. I don't know of another DSP in our space moving at this pace, and believe me, I look.
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The speed isn't an accident. It comes straight out of the rebuild. Owning our infrastructure makes experiments cheap. One AI system across channels means every new product starts with everything the last one learned. RZR’s iOS Retargeting got to the top in a year because it stood on the new foundation we built and that we continue to invest in and make world-class.
One of our core values as a company is "Win with Customers". That means we must earn the right to work with you.. You don't owe us your business, and you don't have to believe our story. Our clients saw the results long before any index did.
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Retargeting is where we got graded this year. User acquisition and CTV are where we'll get graded next, and we're already building for next year's index.
To our clients: thank you for consistently pushing us. To our team: you did this.
To AppsFlyer: thank you. Our collaboration and partnership have been tremendous, and I cannot thank the Appsflyer team enough for the continued collaboration as we launch new products and as they launch new solutions for our combined clients.
Our clients' results earned this ranking, but somebody has to check the homework, and AppsFlyer does it for the whole industry with the same red pen for everyone. That third-party scorecard gave us the chance to show the market what our clients already knew: for iOS gaming retargeting on the open internet, RZR is #1.
Beyond the report, AppsFlyer is a partner we work with closely every day on behalf of the clients we share, and that partnership makes both of us better for them.
And to everyone who told us iOS retargeting couldn't be done: I appreciate you. One of my favorite things in this job is proving people wrong. I have done it all my life.
We're just getting started.
See the full AppsFlyer Performance Index (2026 Edition).
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