AppLovin is a great app if you are trying to grow your business and want to expand into mobile gaming or the mobile industry in general. It is less appropriate for a business that wants to set up a traditional store and not grow into the mobile gaming industry. This app is very popular in the gaming industry as it boasts over 300 million users as of June 2022.
Unity can cover most of the needs of game development, both for 2D and 3D. It is particularly well suited to games designed to be played presented and played on web pages, but it can create high-end content as well. Perhaps it would be less suited in high-end games which depend to much of sophisticated lighting effects since Cryengine and Unreal are more evolved in this area. On the other extreme, in the case of very simple 2D games for web pages, like newsgames, simpler game engines probably would be more advisable for a faster production, like Construct (2 or 3) or even Twine (in case of text adventures)
AppLovin has been a great partner for us. We have used them through our DSP and gotten great results with them. Their focus is on monetizing publishers' inventory and they could put more resources into their standalone service as an SSP to make sure DSPs can consider them strategic partners for the long term.
It's actually incredibly easy to use given the complex tasks you have. Once you learn the various windows it becomes second nature. Compared to something like Blender (which I would probably rate as a 2 on usability), the learning curve of Unity is a breeze! The only improvements I can think of would be to streamline some common workflows so you don't have to dig through menus to find them.
AppLovin's support team is their weakest point. They are not very responsive and they tend to provide solutions that do not fix the problem. It seems like they will only be proactive if you are a very big client and by doing that they are preventing the rest of the client base from increasing spend on their platform and growing their accounts
I have not had to use Unity's support extensively. This is likely because there is so much documentation and so many classes available for free online. Due to this, there is little need for support. They were very responsive when I requested educational licensing. Setting it up and providing it all quickly.
Of all of the competitors above, AppLovin is the one that is more focused on gaming and that has a better pool of users in terms of conversion rate. While PubMatic and Magnate offer better solutions for CTV, AppLovin is better than InMobi and MoPub regarding in-app formats and inventory.
Unreal Engine is a fantastic piece of software but it has a much steeper learning curve and an arcane, idiosyncratic way of developing software that is quite foreign. Unity uses some similar concepts to Adobe Flex, which we've always found easy and sensible. It is also easier to go to Unity having either a Java or C# background. We also explored using Android Studio and Xcode on their own for AR experiences and that is a suitable option depending on the use case, but Unity is still a great tool for rapid prototyping and even for building finished, shipped apps.
