Nomad eSIM has one App Store ad that Apple marks as over a year old, still recorded on 21 July 2026, running in twenty European countries. It got there on 865 ad records. Saily and Holafly each bought more than 3,000 records in the same year and neither of them has an English creative still live anywhere near that long. Holafly's oldest ad still running is 42 days old.
We pulled every App Store ad these six apps ran across all 25 EU storefronts from Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires. Here is the survivor board, sorted by how long each app's oldest still-running creative has been live. Data window ends 22 July 2026.
The survivor board
| App | Distinct creatives | Oldest creative still running | Total ad records tracked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nomad eSIM (LotusFlare) | 17 | Over a year, "eSim Card Mobile & Travel WiFi", 20 countries | 865 |
| Ubigi (Transatel) | 26 | Over a year, "Virtual SIM card for Internet", 16 countries | 528 |
| Yesim (Genesis Group) | 23 | Over a year, "SIM virtuale • Dati illimitati", Italy | 577 |
| Saily (Nordvpn S.A.) | 24 | 338 days, "Dados móveis instantaneamente", Portugal | 3,544 |
| Airalo | 10 | 309 days, "Günstige, globale Verbindung", Germany | 155 |
| Holafly | 32 | 42 days, "Internet para viagens", Portugal | 3,207 |
Four readings of this table:
- The three smallest advertisers hold every year-plus survivor. Nomad (865 records), Yesim (577) and Ubigi (528) each keep at least one creative that Apple dates back beyond its one-year window and that was still recorded on 21 July 2026. Between them they bought under a third of what Saily and Holafly bought. An ad that has run for more than a year is an ad that pays for itself, so these three found their line and stopped shopping for a new one.
- Holafly buys the most creatives and keeps none of them. 32 distinct creatives, 3,207 records, and the oldest one still running is 42 days old, a Portuguese line launched on 9 June. Holafly did have a year-plus English ad, "Virtual prepaid SIM for travel", and it went dark on 9 September 2025. Everything since has been a test that ended, and on 3 July it started another wide one, "Local SIM Card & WiFi Hotspot", now live in 24 countries at 18 days old.
- Saily's survivor is not the ad it spent the year proving. Its English "eSIM plans for mobile internet" line ran past a year across 14 countries and stopped on 8 April 2026. The oldest creative it still has running is Portuguese, "Dados móveis instantaneamente", live since 17 August 2025. More on that in the Saily teardown.
- The category's best-known brand barely advertises here. Airalo shows 155 ad records across five storefronts, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. Saily bought about 23 times that volume. Whatever is driving Airalo's installs in Europe, App Store search ads are a small part of it.
Volume and survival point in opposite directions in this category, and the gap is wide enough that it is not noise.
Where these apps buy
Almost all of it is App Store search results, the slot you see after typing a query. In the records we retrieved, Saily ran 1,238 search placements against 8 product-page placements. That is close to pure intent buying: someone types "esim" or "data abroad" and the ad meets an already-formed decision.
Two apps do something else. Nomad bought Search tab placement (38 records) and product-page placement (30), and Ubigi is the only advertiser on this board with Today tab records at all, four of them. Both are the smaller spenders, and both are buying browse surfaces that reach people before they have typed anything. Holafly also holds 49 product-page records, which is where it puts creative that is not winning search.
What the winning copy says
Every survivor names the object. "Virtual SIM card for Internet" (Ubigi, 16 countries). "eSim Card Mobile & Travel WiFi" (Nomad, 20 countries). "SIM-Karte fur Internet und SMS" (Nomad, Germany and Austria). "Piani di dati per il viaggio" (Nomad, Italy). "SIM virtuale • Dati illimitati" (Yesim, Italy).
Look at the word doing the work: SIM card. The whole point of an eSIM is that there is no card. The ads that survive use the term the customer types anyway, not the technically correct one, and they pair it with the outcome in the same six words: internet, data, WiFi, SMS, unlimited.
Now look at what died. Holafly's "e SIM for Travel and Hotspot" ran 149 days across 20 countries and switched off on 5 July 2026. Saily's "Prepaid mobile internet abroad" ran 72 days across 17 countries and switched off on 17 June. Both are perfectly reasonable lines. Both lost to ads that say "SIM card" in the local language.
How to read this for your own category
Longevity is the cheapest performance signal available to you, and it is free. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that loses money, so a creative still live after a year is a creative that converts. Pull your three closest rivals, sort their ads by how long each has run, and write your first creatives against the survivors rather than the newest thing you saw. Watch the spread between volume and longevity too, because a rival running thousands of records with nothing old is telling you it has not found its winner, and one holding a single line for a year is telling you exactly what works. Check again next month, because a new long-runner appearing is a rival finding a new winner.
You can pull any advertiser at recao.app, free, no account, in about a minute.
Method note: figures are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), swept across all 25 EU storefronts, data window ending 22 July 2026. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across those markets, and "still running" means the creative was recorded on 21 July 2026, the last full day in the window. Apple reports creatives older than its one-year window as over a year rather than a date. Record counts are repository records, a proxy for volume, not euros. Where a storefront query was rate-limited we report the more complete of the two sweeps run the same morning, so record counts are the widest coverage we could retrieve. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Refreshed monthly.