After a full day of talking growth loops, creative strategy, and distribution, the conversation at Business of Apps Berlin 2025 snapped to the moment that ultimately decides whether any of it matters: the paywall.

Peggy Anne Salz sat down with Lanre Akinyemi, VP of Growth at Superwall, to unpack what’s changed in paywall optimisation and why the teams winning in 2026 won’t treat monetisation as a static screen, but as a living system they can iterate daily.

Paywalls used to be slow, expensive, and ignored

Lanre’s starting point was blunt. App teams spend months building value, acquiring users, and driving engagement, then underinvest in the highest-stakes touchpoint in the entire journey.

The reason is operational, not strategic. Traditionally, changing a paywall means design work, development work, App Store submission, waiting through review, and then waiting again for users to update. If the change fails, the process resets. That friction creates a hidden tax: experimentation becomes rare, slow, and politically difficult.

Superwall’s pitch is to remove that constraint. Once the SDK is installed, paywall design changes, segmentation, and flow logic can be configured remotely without shipping a new app release. That shifts paywalls from “something we rebuild every few weeks” to “something we can test continuously”.

Treat the paywall like a landing page

Lanre described a simple pattern he sees across top performers: they don’t treat paywalls as generic UI. They treat them like high-intent landing pages.

That means relevance matters. If a sports app knows a user is engaging with soccer content, showing baseball creative on the paywall is a self-inflicted conversion penalty. The goal is to align the paywall to the “magic moment” as closely as possible, aka the specific context that made the user care.

Entry points matter, and the debate is messy

Peggy pushed on a tension every subscription app recognises, namely that showing a paywall early can feel aggressive, but moving it later can miss the peak conversion moment.

Lanre acknowledged the trade-off. Many apps still see their highest conversion rate immediately after onboarding, because intent is fresh and the user is primed to say yes. He also pointed to a behavioural dynamic teams often ignore. People react more strongly to losing access than gaining it. Give users premium features first, then take them away, and renewal likelihood climbs.

But the more important point wasn’t “early vs late”. It was optionality. Different apps, user cohorts, and markets behave differently, which is why the only durable strategy is testing.

Why your paywall is your most important growth level

Source: Business of Apps via YouTube

Localisation isn’t translation, it’s persuasion

One of the more concrete sections of the conversation focused on localisation, not just in language but in what motivates trust.

Lanre cited Japan as a market where social proof consistently outperforms feature-heavy pitches or short-term discounts. Many successful paywalls there are deliberately long, built around testimonials and reviews to establish legitimacy. In the US, the same app may find that a strong sale framing lifts conversions more reliably.

The implication is uncomfortable but useful: there isn’t a universal “best paywall”. There are only hypotheses that survive contact with a specific audience.

Packaging and choice can lift conversion

Lanre shared an experiment pattern that keeps showing up: giving users structured choice can materially improve conversion.

One example was “choose your trial style” using introductory offers — such as paying a small amount for 30 days of access versus taking a shorter free trial that rolls into an annual plan. Even when the choice is partly psychological, the feeling of control reduces commitment anxiety, particularly for younger users who aren’t paying but hesitate at subscription lock-in.

The underlying principle is less about clever pricing and more about lowering the emotional barrier to saying yes.

Show the plan you think fits and recover if they decline

Another tactic Lanre highlighted was sequencing, aka leading with the plan most likely to convert for a given user, then falling back to a softer option if they refuse.

For example, show an annual offer first to high-propensity segments, then present a monthly plan as a recovery path. What matters here is not the exact plan order, but the ability to implement the logic quickly and iterate without a two-week dev cycle.

Retention and winback are part of the paywall system

The conversation then moved beyond first conversion. Lanre described winback as a natural extension of paywall infrastructure.

If a user is still reachable, teams can re-open a monetisation flow through push notifications that deep-link into a specific recovery paywall. More advanced programs use lifecycle email to deliver an offer that opens directly into the app at the right paywall screen, avoiding “random place” journeys that break intent.

The point is that paywalls aren’t only for new users. They also become a control surface for reactivation.

Web payments are becoming the 2026 monetisation story

Looking ahead, Lanre tied 2026 to a major industry shift: payments outside the app stores are becoming more viable, but only if the UX stays native.

He described Superwall’s recent work to reduce the friction of off-store payments, moving from sending users out to Safari, to an in-app browser, to a drawer-style experience that feels like a native purchase flow and supports Apple Pay.

In internal testing shared on stage, he said the Stripe flow showed near-flat conversion compared with in-app purchase (reported as roughly a -1% change) while avoiding platform fees — an outcome that, if it holds across apps, will reshape how teams think about margin.

Small changes compound

Lanre closed with a reminder that most paywall optimisation is incremental, not miraculous.

Microcopy changes — “Continue” versus “Try for free” versus “Get started for $0” — can move conversion a point or two at a time. That sounds small until you repeat it, month after month, without rewriting the product. The compounding effect becomes the strategy.

Watch the full App Talks episode to discover all of Lanre’s insights. You can also watch all episodes of App Talks here.