An astrology app got 580k installs in 25 days: it doesn't sell star charts, it sells ad inventory

In Oct 12, a developer called Kienmaly Mobi launched two astrology and palm-reading apps on Google Play at the same time. This one, Astrology: Palm Reader & Tarot, got 585k installs by Nov 6, and the other got 2.89M. Both are free, with the money coming entirely from ads, and the users were bought with ad spend. The product itself is decent, but not one review mentions the product. Below: where the installs came from, how the money comes back, and whether you should build one too.

An app that shows four ads the moment you install it

One night in Oct 23, an Indian user left a one-star review on Play: "Just installed it, and 4 ads came one after another. I haven't even filled in my birth info, and 2 more showed up." The same day another wrote: "Too many ads... where's the soulmate portrait? Stop lying." A week later someone summed it up in one line: "Astrology❌ Adslogy✅".

Two days before, in Oct 21, a Facebook account called "Takahashi Himari" posted a Reel. The name is a Japanese woman's name, and the account was new. The caption read "Want to know where your life is heading? Precise palm reading, daily horoscope, tarot readings... download Astrology: Palm Reader & Tarot now!" Below was an "Unlock Your Future Now! ✨ Install now" button that jumps straight to the Play store. The post got 1.7K interactions and 20 shares. An install button, a persona account, posted as a Reel: this is the typical look of a Meta app-install ad.

These two things describe the same business: buy installs with ads, then recoup through ads inside the app.

What it is

The store page is well written. Enter your birth date, time and place once, and the app calculates a full Western birth chart: sun, moon and rising signs, 10 planets, Placidus houses, all aspects, exportable as a PDF. Two people's charts can be overlaid for a synastry view. Snap a photo of your palm and AI draws the heart, head, life and fate lines on the image. There are 78 tarot cards, three-card spreads, a book of answers, and face reading that runs locally on the phone. It supports 10 languages. The developer's website calculates your three main signs right in the browser, noting that planetary positions come from the open-source Astronomy Engine.

It is priced at 0, with no in-app purchases and no subscription, and the store listing is marked "Contains ads". There have been no major version updates since launch; the store page was last updated on 10-28.

How the volume built up

New installs over the last 7 days: 317k, averaging 45k per day. But on 11-05 and 11-06 it grew only about 30k each, noticeably slower than the week before. 11-06 It is also on lifestyle free charts in 26 countries at once: #8 in Vietnam, #9 in Singapore and the UAE, #10 in India, #18 in Nigeria, #19 in Thailand.

One number shows these users didn't find it on their own: 585k installs produced only 1,167 ratings, about 0.2%, with new ratings per day holding steady at 50 to 60. Users who search for an app themselves leave ratings at a much higher rate; users pulled in by an ad who find they were misled mostly don't rate, they just uninstall.

Where users come from:

• Meta ads, confirmed. It's the Reel from the persona account above; the same account also posted a caption with identical wording.
• Google app ads, inferred. Studios running this playbook usually buy on Meta and Google together. Charting in 26 countries at once, with the main push in India, Vietnam and Nigeria, fits programmatic UA, but there is no direct evidence.
• Organic from category charts. Some, but the rankings were pushed up by paid installs.
• Content and community: none. No posts by this developer on X in the last 30 days, no related TikTok videos, no media coverage, and no discussion on Reddit.

The review line "where's the soulmate portrait" is worth noting: the app has no such feature, which means the ad creative used a hook the product doesn't have. Users click "See what your other half looks like" and end up with a birth chart after installing.

Where the money comes from

There is only one route: app-open, interstitial and rewarded video ads (presumably through an ad network like AdMob). So the countries were chosen as a mix: India, Vietnam and Nigeria have cheap installs and drive the volume; Singapore, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and Hong Kong have high ad rates and lift average ad revenue per user.

How much one install costs and how much ad money one user brings in are not visible from outside. Growth slowed from 11-05, which may mean this package isn't paying back, or that budget was shifted to the sister package that performs better (inferred).

Who's behind it: a studio running several apps at once

Two near-identical apps launched on the same day and advertised together, with more budget going to whichever performs. The palm-reading one ran at five times the volume; this one is the second package. The developer's websites are all free Netlify pages, one domain even includes "ads" in its name; the privacy policy sits on Google Sites, and the contact email is Outlook. The developer page on Play has the tagline "Smart Mobile Games Studio !". Third-party stats sites show the account has been publishing apps for 2017 years, previously TV remote and screen-casting tools. The team's country wasn't found; judging by the playbook, the countries it charts in, and its peers, it's most likely a Vietnamese toolkit studio (inferred).

Who it's competing with

Almost everyone using this playbook is doing the same thing. Palm reading, tarot and star charts were bulk-launched in the Vietnamese studio circle in the second half of this year:

It is itself a copycat: HoangSi's palm-reading package, July, is now 13.7M. Horae launched the same day, and two more appeared in the 10 days after.

The other two groups take different routes. In India, Astro99, Reva, Astrotalk and AstroSage do Vedic astrology and live astrologer consultations; Astrotalk has 115M lifetime installs and actually earns from users paying. In the US and Europe, Co–Star, The Pattern and Nebula run subscription brands, mostly on iOS. Above them sit ChatGPT and Gemini, which will also give you a long take on a photo of your palm.

Why the full birth chart didn't carry it

It has the most features in this peer group: others only offer a palm scan, while it has synastry, composite charts, solar return charts and PDF export. But the reviews for 5 stars are almost all one or two words like "good", "nice" or "so far so good", and the 1-star reviews are all about ads, with none mentioning the chart. The sister app focused on palm reading, with fewer features, got five times as many installs.

The answer: paid-acquisition users click in for the hook in the ad (palm reading, soulmate, "unlock your future"), not because the chart is professionally done. With this approach, the app only needs to survive a few opens and show a few ads. No matter how good it is, better quality won't bring in more installs.

If it were you

C. You can learn a full paid-acquisition matrix playbook here, but copying it isn't worth much. This niche is already being flooded on Play by a whole batch of Vietnamese studios at once, competing on ad budgets, creative refresh speed and ad-monetization tuning, where a small team has no edge. 1-star reviews focus on "too many ads" and "misleading ads", and apps like this don't last long.

Who it suits: teams already making Google Play tools or entertainment apps, with Meta and Google ad accounts, who can work out the cost per install and ad revenue per user, and who want to test astrology and palm reading as one more theme in a matrix.

Who it doesn't suit: indie devs who want to build an astrology brand on product quality (nobody on this path looks at how good your chart is); anyone who hasn't run paid ads and is relying on organic store traffic; anyone unwilling to make the trade-off of "ads pop up on open" in UX.

How to do it: if you still want to try, don't copy it, do the half it does badly. First, switch to an audience and platform with higher willingness to pay: iOS users in the US, Japan and Korea, with palm reading plus chart, weekly subscription or one-time report purchase, ads kept to a near minimum, competing with brands like Co–Star and Nebula instead of fighting Vietnamese apps for cheap India traffic. Second, switch language: India already has Astro99 and Reva for Vedic astrology, but I didn't see anyone seriously localizing astrology into Indonesian, Arabic or Portuguese this time (unverified; before you start, count the Play charts by country and the Meta ad library yourself).

How to get users: still paid acquisition, there's no other route in this category. Copy its hook directions for creatives (your palm, your partner's look, the next few months), but the hook needs to actually be in the product; "where's the soulmate sketch" is what happens when creative and product don't match. Start by testing 20 to 30 creatives in one country on a small budget, and only add spend once you can cut cost per install to half of what one paying user or one user's ad revenue brings in (inference).

When to move: no clear holiday window, but this batch of apps is launching in a cluster, so the later you go, the more crowded it gets. If you want to test, finish before year end.

What would show I've read it wrong: ① this app and its sister app keep adding tens of thousands of installs a day after December, while ratings don't fall below 3 stars broadly, which would mean this playbook's numbers work better than they look and is worth following closely; ② this batch of Vietnamese palm-reading apps largely stops updating, gets delisted or sees growth go to zero after January, which would mean the window has closed and even they can't keep up; ③ Google Play tightens policy on "ad creative not matching the product" or app-open ads and delists these apps in bulk, which would end this route outright.

Sources

• Google Play store page (11-06 read): installs, rating, description, reviews, update date; daily installs and rating counts are store data recorded daily from 10-29 to 11-06.
• Chart ranking: Google Play lifestyle free charts by country, 11-06.
• Facebook posts: Reels from the Takahashi Himari account 10-21 (facebook.com/61590684152972).
• Developer: Play developer page, astrology-horoscope.netlify.app, ads-kienmaly-mobi.netlify.app, AppBrain developer page.
• Competitors: Google Play app pages, 11-06. Team nationality is inferred.