Google Apps Summit Vietnam: APAC’s Fastest Growing Market
Vietnam is no longer a “promising or emerging” market.
It is already one of the engines.
Ho Chi Minh City did not just host a conference. We’re talking about the APAC App economy! 😅
Google brought together over 700 C level leaders, top developers and strategists from across Southeast Asia, India, China, Korea, Australia & beyond.
Yes, we were also there.
More?
Tracy got you covered, too!
Lezgo for the deep dive! 👇🏻
Vietnam by the numbers: from “Outsourcing Hub” to export machine
Google & AppMagic dropped a set of stats that basically reframe how you think about Vietnam:
- 65 percent growth in App & Gaming IAP revenue, the fastest rate in APAC
- More than 6 billion downloads of Vietnamese Apps & Games in 2024
- 5.7 billion of those from outside Vietnam
- That is almost 12,000 downloads per minute for Made-in-Vietnam Apps
- Over VND 2 trillion in export revenue, roughly 80 million USD from Google Play alone
- Around 500,000 jobs supported across dev, content, ads + Even OEM manufacturing
Or as Marc Woo, Managing Director of Google Vietnam, put it on stage:
“Vietnam is not just an emerging market, it is a global app powerhouse.”
This is not just about one breakout hit. It is a volume play. Hyper casual, tools, utilities, productivity, AI assistants, web3 experiments, live service games, all shipping from Vietnam to the world.
APAC is heading for $750B & Vietnam is one of the accelerators
Across the summit, speakers repeated one macro line:
- The global app economy is on track for 750 billion dollars by 2030
- APAC is both the largest and fastest-growing region
- Downloads in emerging APAC markets have grown 4x in five years
While mature Western markets like the US are starting to shrink a few percent, emerging APAC is still expanding. At the summit you felt that split very clearly:
- Korea was highlighted for massive multiplayer hits
- Japan for global IP driven successes like Pokémon Go
- Indonesia for vertical video super apps
- Vietnam for hyper casual scale and export power
Vietnam is not only contributing installs.
It is contributing revenue growth and new studios that go global from day one.
AI is now the default Dev Stack, not a nice-to-have
One of the strongest threads from all sessions:
- 90 percent of global game developers already use AI in their workflows
This is not “AI makes our logo cooler” territory. It is very operational:
- Code reviews and refactoring with Gemini API and Google AI Studio
- Asset testing and variant generation for ads and in game content
- Faster prototyping and iteration for new features
Examples that kept coming up in the summit:
- Entri (India) uses AI for code review and content workflows, and cuts development time by up to 40 percent
- Vidio (Indonesia) uses Veo 3 based tech in VidioGen to automate video production
- Vulcan Labs (Vietnam) shipped Daily Smith, an AI assistant for scheduling, content and office work
- Wolffun (Vietnam) talked about Thetan Arena and how integrating Google Gemini:
- increased ad content output by about 40 percent
- shortened dev cycles
- helped them compete globally in a very crowded PVP space
The key framing from Aditya Swamy, Managing Director of Google Play: the future app economy is built around intelligent, personalized experiences, and Vietnam is already building for that future, not catching up to it.
From Hyper Casual Farms to Hybrid Monetization Systems
A few years ago, “Vietnam” in the app context mostly meant hyper casual factories and outsourcing.
At Apps Summit 2025, the discussion was very different:
They’re now focusing on cracking the IAP market.
- Movement away from pure ad funded hyper casual
- Strong push toward hybrid monetization
- IAPs layered on top of ad revenue
- more focus on LTV and quality ad experiences
- Clear focus areas:
- App quality and ad experience to protect LTV
- Sustainable growth via hybrid monetization and AI-powered UA
- AI leadership as a competitive edge, not a buzzword
Vietnamese studios on stage talked less about “cheap installs” and more about cohorts, retention curves and monetization mix. For a lot of teams, AI is not just a production tool, it is part of their UA optimization pipeline as well.
Google’s long-game in Vietnam: Accelerators & Training
Google is clearly playing a long game in Vietnam and wider APAC. Key moves announced or reiterated at the summit:
- Google Play Apps Accelerator
- 12 week mentorship program for early stage, high potential app companies
- Game Design Class
- App Design with AI Workshop
- “Made in Vietnam” collections that spotlight local creativity
- Policy aligned training in Hanoi to help devs navigate regulations
- Security and trust features like Google Play Protect and Enhanced Fraud Protection
At the same time, Google was very explicit that it is not ready to launch a data center in Vietnam yet. For now, it relies on infrastructure in Malaysia & Thailand, while it keeps building out the ecosystem locally through people, programs, and policy support.
Why does all this matter?
For the global industry, Google Apps Summit Vietnam was more than a local PR moment. It was a signal.
Here is what it means in practical terms for Studios, Publishers & UA leaders:
- Vietnam is already a serious export market
- Treat Vietnamese studios as peers, potential co dev and co publishing partners
- APAC is rebalancing the app economy
- Growth, new genres and new business models are increasingly tested here first
- AI is now table stakes
- If your pipeline still runs without AI for code, assets and UA, you are already slower than your competition
- Hybrid monetization is the new default
- Ads only is a risk, especially with Gen Z and rising acquisition costs
- Quality matters more than ever
- Better ad experiences and better personalization are now directly tied to LTV, and the biggest players treat that as a strategic lever, not an optimization detail
Vietnam went into Google Apps Summit 2025 with momentum. It came out of it with something closer to a label:
APAC growth engine. Global App powerhouse.
And for anyone in Mobile Gaming, UA, or app monetization, HCMC in November 2025 was a pretty strong reminder that the center of gravity keeps drifting east.
Awards Ceremony?
Best of Vietnam User Growth Champion: iKame
Best of Vietnam Rising App Category: ABI Game Studio
AI Innovation Pioneer: Supercent
To be updated with further data.
All for ya 🙂
