From points to pull: What makes a loyalty app worth keeping in 2026?

That's the central challenge for loyalty in 2026. Consumers are more app-savvy, more impatient and more ruthless about what earns a permanent place on their phone than at any point in the market's history. The question brands need to be asking is: how do we build something good enough that customers keep coming back on their own terms?

Our 2026 Mobile Customer Loyalty Report, based on surveys of over 1,000 European consumers across the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland, provides the most comprehensive picture yet of how mobile is shaping loyalty in 2026. Some of what we found confirms what the industry suspects. Some of it should change how brands are investing.

What consumers actually want, and what brands think they want

The gap between brand assumptions and customer reality is one of the defining findings of this year's research. When we asked brands what they believe their customers want most from a loyalty experience, personalisation came out on top,  cited by the clear majority as the primary driver of loyalty engagement. When we asked consumers the same question, they ranked it third behind exclusive pricing, and easy experiences.

 The features that make a loyalty programme feel immediately, tangibly valuable, and frictionless to access, consistently outrank the sophisticated personalisation mechanics that brands are investing most heavily in. 

The pull moment brands are missing

Here's the finding that should prompt an immediate strategy conversation: 47% of consumers open their loyalty app before they go shopping, just 9% open it because they received a push notification.

The pre-shopping moment is where loyalty is won or lost, yet most brands are designing their engagement strategy around push rather than pull. Too many notifications ranked as the single biggest consumer frustration in our research. Brands investing in making their app genuinely useful at that pre-shopping moment are investing in the moment that actually influences behaviour.

Those leading with notifications risk building a reputation for noise at exactly the moment consumers are deciding whether to keep the app at all.

The generational fault line

18–24s use fewer loyalty apps than any other age group in our survey. They're the cohort brands most often say they design for, but are the one most underserved by loyalty as it currently exists.

"I lack patience. I need rewards instantly or will literally just download an app for a reward then delete it if I don't get anything else," one Gen Z respondent told us.

The brands named positively by this cohort (Domino's, McDonald's, Monzo, ASOS) share one thing: they feel like products built for people who happen to be young, not loyalty programmes designed to look young. With Gen Z's spending power projected to reach $12.6 trillion by 2030, the window to build those habits is now.

What this means for 2026 and beyond

The loyalty app market in 2026 is not short of investment, innovation or ambition. 

What it is short of, in too many cases, is a clear-eyed understanding of what the person on the other end of the programme actually wants, and a mobile experience designed around that understanding rather than around internal assumptions, operational convenience or last year's strategy.

The full findings from Apadmi's 2026 Mobile Customer Loyalty Report, including consumer data from four European markets, brand survey results, sector analysis, real-world examples and more, are available to download now.