Mobile App Revenue Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Alex Rivera | Last updated: August 11, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Consumers spent $167 billion inside iOS and Google Play apps in 2025 — up 10.6% year over year, against download growth of just 0.8%. Money is now growing thirteen times faster than installs. Axis Intelligence Research puts the resulting Attention Yield Index (AYI™) at $31.51 per 1,000 hours of app use, a 6.6% rise on 2024.
Quick Answer
Global gross consumer spending across the iOS App Store and Google Play reached $167 billion in 2025, split $85.6 billion to non-game apps and $81.8 billion to games — the first year apps outearned games. Axis Intelligence Research calculates gross revenue per download at $1.121, up 9.7% on 2024, and finds generative AI apps monetise attention at 3.3× the market average.
Key Findings
- According to Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 report, gross in-app purchase and paid-app revenue across iOS and Google Play reached $167 billion in 2025, a 10.6% increase over 2024.
- Axis Intelligence Research calculates the 2025 Attention Yield Index (AYI™) for all mobile apps at $31.51 per 1,000 hours of use, up from $29.57 in 2024.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds generative AI apps returned an AYI of at least $104.17 per 1,000 hours in 2025 — 3.31 times the all-app market reading.
- Sensor Tower’s 2026 data shows the top 1% of publishers captured $154 billion of 2025 in-app purchase revenue against $13.1 billion for the remaining 99%, a ratio of 11.8 to 1.
- Apple’s fiscal 2025 Form 10-K reports Services revenue of $109.158 billion at a 75.4% gross margin, while Alphabet’s fiscal 2025 Form 10-K reports $48.030 billion in Google subscriptions, platforms, and devices — the line that contains Google Play app and in-app purchase sales.
How Much Revenue Do Mobile Apps Generate in 2026?
The number most people are looking for is $167 billion: gross consumer spending on in-app purchases, subscriptions and paid downloads across the iOS App Store and Google Play during calendar 2025, per Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026. It grew 10.6% year over year. That figure is the one journalists cite, and it is the one this page anchors to — but it is narrower than “mobile app revenue” as most people imagine it, and the gap matters enormously for anyone sizing the market.
What the $167 billion counts: paid app downloads, one-time in-app purchases and subscriptions billed through Apple and Google, measured gross — before the platform takes its cut.
What it does not count: in-app advertising revenue, third-party Android stores, Android in China, direct-to-consumer web checkout, and any purchase routed outside the store billing systems. Sensor Tower states this scope explicitly in the report’s methodology note.
So the headline is a floor, not a ceiling. Anyone quoting $167 billion as “the mobile app economy” is quoting the in-app purchase economy and calling it something bigger.
| Metric, 2025 | Value | YoY change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gross IAP + paid revenue, iOS + Google Play | $167 billion | +10.6% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| New app downloads | 149 billion | +0.8% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Total hours spent | 5.3 trillion | +3.8% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Average time per user per day | 3.6 hours | +1.1% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Apps used per user per month | 34 | +5.4% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Gross revenue per download (Axis calculation) | $1.121 | +9.7% | Axis Intelligence Research |
The download engine has stalled and the till has not
Three years ago the mobile growth story was reach. It isn’t any more. Installs moved 0.8% in 2025 and revenue moved 10.6% — a spread of nearly ten percentage points that tells you the entire industry is now running a lifetime-value playbook rather than a user-acquisition playbook.
Axis Intelligence Research’s cross-check of the underlying arithmetic supports the report’s own framing: 149 billion downloads over 525,600 minutes works out to 283,486 downloads per minute, and $167 billion works out to $317,732 spent per minute — matching the 284,000 and $318,000 per-minute figures Sensor Tower publishes to within rounding. The inputs reconcile.
Alex Rivera: The interesting number in that table isn’t the $167 billion, it’s the 34. Thirty-four apps per user per month, up 5.4%, while installs are flat — people aren’t downloading more, they’re keeping more of what they already have. That’s a market where the shelf is full and the only way up is charging the people already standing in front of it. Every monetisation decision in 2026 follows from that one fact.
What Is the Attention Yield Index (AYI™)?
Revenue totals tell you how big the market is. They don’t tell you how efficiently a category converts human attention into money — and in a market where attention is the binding constraint rather than reach, that’s the number that actually predicts where capital goes next.
So Axis Intelligence Research built one.
AYI™ — Attention Yield Index. The gross consumer revenue a defined set of apps generates per 1,000 hours of consumer time spent inside them, in a stated period.
How the AYI is calculated
AYI = (Gross consumer revenue in USD ÷ Total hours spent) × 1,000
Both inputs are taken from the same measurement population — Sensor Tower’s iOS and Google Play panel, calendar year 2025 — so the numerator and denominator describe the same apps in the same markets. Revenue is gross, inclusive of store commission. No weighting, no normalisation, no adjustment: the AYI is a ratio of two published figures, and any competent analyst can recompute it from the sources listed in the fact table.
Worked example, all apps worldwide 2025: $167,000,000,000 ÷ 5,300,000,000,000 hours × 1,000 = $31.51 per 1,000 hours
Worked example, generative AI apps 2025: $5,000,000,000 ÷ 48,000,000,000 hours × 1,000 = $104.17 per 1,000 hours
The 2024 all-app reading is derived by deflating both published 2025 figures by their published growth rates: $167B ÷ 1.106 = $150.99B of revenue, and 5.3T ÷ 1.038 = 5.106T hours, giving $29.57 per 1,000 hours.
AYI readings, 2025
| Segment | Gross revenue | Hours spent | AYI (USD per 1,000 hrs) | vs. all-app market |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All apps, worldwide, 2025 | $167.0B | 5.30T | $31.51 | 1.00× |
| All apps, worldwide, 2024 (derived) | $150.99B | 5.106T | $29.57 | — |
| Generative AI apps, worldwide, 2025 | ≥$5.0B | 48.0B | ≥$104.17 | 3.31× |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research, computed from Sensor Tower State of Mobile 2026 inputs. Generative AI revenue is reported as “exceeded $5 billion,” so the AI reading is a floor. As-of date: December 31, 2025. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
What the AYI is telling us
The all-app index rose 6.6% in a year. That is the compact statement of everything else on this page: the industry extracted meaningfully more money from each hour of human attention in 2025 than in 2024, and it did so while barely adding users.
The generative AI reading is the one worth arguing about. At $104.17 per 1,000 hours, AI apps convert attention into revenue more than three times as efficiently as the market average — a gap driven by subscription pricing against a user base that arrived with high intent rather than idle-scrolling habit. Sensor Tower’s own 2026 data supports the direction: Claude’s US mobile average revenue per user climbed from under $0.50 in September 2025 to $2.76 by May 2026, per its State of AI 2026 report.
Two things would pull that reading down, and both are worth watching in the next update. AI apps are still early in their engagement curve, and yield ratios normally compress as casual users arrive after the enthusiasts. And free tiers funded by big-tech balance sheets — Google, Microsoft and X all pushed hard into assistants during 2025 — add hours without adding revenue.
Scope of the AYI
The index measures store-billed consumer revenue only. Advertising revenue, which is the dominant model for social and hypercasual gaming, sits entirely outside it. A category can therefore post a low AYI and still be extremely profitable — social media is the obvious case. Read AYI as a measure of direct consumer monetisation efficiency, not total commercial value. Where alternative billing shifts spending off-store, published gross revenue will understate the true numerator and AYI readings will drift low.
Methodology version: AYI 1.0, published August 11, 2026. Any change to components or scope will be versioned and re-baselined in the open; historical readings will not be silently restated.
Do Non-Game Apps Now Make More Money Than Mobile Games?
Yes — for the first time, and it isn’t close enough to call a rounding error.
Non-game apps generated approximately $85.6 billion in 2025, up 21% year over year and roughly 2.8× the level of five years earlier. Games generated $81.8 billion, up 1.3%. Axis Intelligence Research calculates the split at 51.1% apps, 48.9% games.
| Segment | 2025 gross IAP revenue | YoY | Share of total | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Non-game apps | $85.6B | +21% | 51.1% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Games | $81.8B | +1.3% | 48.9% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Total | $167.4B (sum) | — | 100% | Axis Intelligence Research (sum) |
The sum of the two segment figures is $167.4 billion against a headline of $167 billion — a 0.24% difference consistent with independent rounding of each published number. We report both rather than forcing them to agree.
Games have now posted three consecutive years of revenue growth after the post-2021 correction, but the growth is coming from payer depth, not player count: game downloads fell in 2025 while total hours rose. Hybridcasual was the standout monetisation gainer; hypercasual was the only product model to grow installs, and it did so on ad-funded economics that the $81.8 billion figure doesn’t capture at all.
Alex Rivera: The crossover is being reported as “apps beat games,” which is true and also slightly beside the point. Games didn’t lose. Games grew 1.3% in a year when their install base shrank — that’s an efficiency result most categories would take. What actually happened is that subscription mechanics escaped the productivity aisle and colonised everything: streaming, dating, utilities, photo editors, AI assistants. Fifteen of the top twenty non-game subgenres grew IAP revenue at least 10%. Games didn’t get worse at monetising; everyone else finally caught up.
Mobile App Revenue by Category
| Category | 2025 metric | Value | YoY | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Social Media | Gross IAP revenue | $15B | +16% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Generative AI | Gross IAP revenue | >$5B | ~3× | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Health & Wellness | Gross IAP revenue | $4.5B | +13% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Video Streaming | Gross IAP revenue | — | +18% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Games | Gross IAP revenue | $81.8B | +1.3% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
Social Media was the largest single non-game genre by in-app purchase revenue in 2025 at $15 billion, growing 16% — TikTok’s virtual coins, YouTube Premium and transactional content, and Snapchat’s subscription plus one-off purchases like Snapstreak Restore. That a category built entirely on advertising is now the top non-advertising earner is the clearest single signal of where privacy regulation has pushed the industry.
Revenue per download by category
Where both figures are published for the same population, Axis Intelligence Research computes gross revenue per download:
| Segment, 2025 | Gross revenue | Downloads | Revenue per download |
|---|---|---|---|
| All apps, worldwide | $167.0B | 149B | $1.121 |
| Generative AI | ≥$5.0B | 3.8B | ≥$1.32 |
| Health & Wellness | $4.5B | 3.96B | $1.14 |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research, computed from Sensor Tower State of Mobile 2026. As of December 31, 2025.
Note how tight that spread is compared with the AYI spread. Generative AI earns 18% more per download than the market but 231% more per hour — the category’s advantage is retention and pricing, not install quality. Download-based benchmarks systematically hide that.
How Much Money Does the Average App Actually Make?
Far less than the headline suggests, and the concentration is the most under-reported statistic in mobile.
In 2025 the top 1% of publishers captured 92% of all in-app purchase revenue and 81% of downloads. In dollars: $154 billion to the top 1%, $13.1 billion to the remaining 99% — a ratio Axis Intelligence Research calculates at 11.8 to 1.
| Publisher tier, 2025 | IAP revenue | Share | Download share | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 1% of publishers | $154B | 92.2% | 81.0% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Remaining 99% | $13.1B | 7.8% | 19.0% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
There is a genuine countertrend inside that. The bottom 99% share has risen from 5.3% in 2019 to 7.8% in 2025, and its growth rate is now outpacing the top tier — a shift Sensor Tower attributes partly to generative AI compressing development cost for small publishers. It is real. It is also a move from very small to slightly less small.
Eighteen apps crossed $1 billion in annual gross IAP revenue in 2025, evenly split between games and non-games. Three did it for the first time: ChatGPT at $3.4 billion — the third-highest-grossing app of the year behind TikTok and Google One, and the fastest app ever to reach $3 billion in annual IAP — plus CapCut and WeTV.
Alex Rivera: If you’re a developer reading a $167 billion market size and modelling your share of it, use $13.1 billion. That’s the pool outside the top 1%, and the top 1% by revenue starts at roughly $5 million a year — a threshold most people assume is mid-tier. The market isn’t a pyramid, it’s a spike with a very long flat plain, and almost every “app economy” chart ever published draws the spike and crops the plain.
Which Countries Generate the Most Mobile App Revenue?
The United States remained the largest mobile market by consumer spending in 2025 at nearly $60 billion. Axis Intelligence Research calculates that as roughly 36% of global gross app spending from a country holding about 4% of world population.
India led downloads; the US led dollars. India and Pakistan were the only two markets in the global top ten to post positive year-over-year download growth. Western Europe drove revenue growth, led by the UK, Germany and France.
One structural fact deserves more attention than it gets: nearly four out of every five app downloads and dollars occurred outside the country where the app was developed. Mobile remains one of the most genuinely borderless consumer markets in existence — though India, Singapore, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are all actively increasing the revenue share going to domestic publishers.
How Much Do Apple and Google Earn From Apps?
Neither company discloses App Store or Google Play revenue as a standalone line. What they do disclose, in filings, is this:
| Company | Fiscal 2025 line item | Revenue | YoY | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple | Services | $109.158B | +14% | Apple Form 10-K, FY2025 (SEC) |
| Apple | Services gross margin | 75.4% | +1.5 pp | Apple Form 10-K, FY2025 (SEC) |
| Alphabet | Google subscriptions, platforms, and devices | $48.030B | +19.1% | Alphabet Form 10-K, FY2025 (SEC) |
Apple’s fiscal 2025 10-K attributes the Services increase specifically to advertising, the App Store and cloud services, and reports Services gross margin at 75.4% against 36.8% for Products. Alphabet’s 10-K defines “platforms” within that line as primarily Google Play sales of apps and in-app purchases — bundled with YouTube subscriptions, Google One and Pixel hardware.
Why we will not add these two numbers together
Apple Services plus Google subscriptions, platforms and devices is $157.19 billion, which is 94.1% of the $167 billion Sensor Tower figure. That coincidence is meaningless and we won’t publish it as a finding.
Apple Services includes advertising, iCloud, AppleCare, Apple Music, Apple TV and payment services — none of which is app store revenue. Alphabet’s line includes YouTube Premium and Pixel phones. Meanwhile the Sensor Tower figure is gross consumer spending, of which the platforms keep only their commission. The two sides measure different things in different directions, and any publication that stacks them is producing a number that means nothing. Publishing them side by side with the definitions stated is the honest version — and, we’d argue, the more useful one.
How Big Is In-App Advertising Revenue?
This is the half of app revenue the $167 billion figure omits entirely, and it is where the fastest company-level growth in mobile is happening.
AppLovin, the largest independent mobile ad platform, reported fiscal 2025 revenue of $5.481 billion, up 70% year over year, with net income of $3.334 billion — a 61% net margin — and adjusted EBITDA margin of 82%, per its fourth quarter and full year 2025 results published February 11, 2026. Its Q1 2026 guidance was $1.745–1.775 billion.
An 82% EBITDA margin in an intermediation business is not normal. It is what happens when a single machine-learning bidding system takes share across an entire market at once.
The share data confirms it. Ad network impression share across mobile games in 2025:
| Ad network | 2025 impression share | 2024 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| AdMob | 33.0% | 36.0% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| AppLovin | 27.3% | 24.4% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Mintegral | 16.0% | 11.5% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Unity | 10.2% | 13.4% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Liftoff | 4.9% | 5.9% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
| Other | 8.6% | 8.8% | Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026 |
Formats moved as sharply as networks. Video rose from 44.9% to 53.7% of gaming ad impressions, playables from 6.3% to 13.3%, while static images fell from 48.9% to 33.0%. Rewarded placements went from 11.5% to 17.7% of impressions. The whole delivery mix shifted toward formats that demand active attention — which is the advertising market arriving at the same conclusion the AYI describes on the purchase side.
How Much Revenue Do AI Apps Make on Mobile?
Generative AI apps generated more than $5 billion in gross in-app purchase revenue in 2025, roughly tripling year over year, on 3.8 billion downloads (double 2024) and 48 billion hours of use — about 3.6× the 2024 total and nearly ten times the 2023 level. Sessions passed one trillion.
The trajectory has continued into 2026. Sensor Tower’s State of AI 2026 report, published June 16, 2026, projects global in-app purchase revenue from AI apps to exceed $4 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, a 36% increase over the second half of 2025, with time spent on generative AI apps climbing from 17.2 billion hours in H1 2025 to a projected 36 billion in H1 2026. ChatGPT became the fastest mobile app ever to reach one billion monthly active users, hitting the mark in May 2026 — three years from launch, faster than TikTok, YouTube or Instagram.
Set against the AYI framework, the H1 2026 pairing implies the category is still yielding above $100 per 1,000 hours as it scales — the compression that normally follows mass adoption has not arrived yet.
What Is Changing App Revenue Economics in 2026?
Two legal developments are quietly reshaping where app dollars land, and neither shows up in any market-size chart.
The US anti-steering injunction. Apple’s fiscal 2025 10-K discloses that on April 30, 2025 the US District Court for the Northern District of California found Apple in violation of the 2021 Epic Games injunction and enjoined it from imposing any commission or fee on purchases consumers make outside an app, from restricting how developers guide consumers to outside purchases, or from otherwise interfering with a consumer’s choice to transact in or out of the app. Apple’s request to stay the decision pending appeal was denied; the Ninth Circuit heard expedited oral arguments in October 2025. For as long as it stands, US iOS developers can route checkout to the web at zero platform commission.
The Digital Markets Act. The same filing discloses that on April 23, 2025 the European Commission fined Apple €500 million under Article 5(4) of the DMA and issued a cease-and-desist order requiring removal of restrictions preventing developers from steering users to alternative distribution channels. Apple has appealed. A separate Article 6(4) investigation remains open, carrying potential fines of up to 10% of annual worldwide net sales. Alphabet’s 10-K flags parallel exposure, citing regulations and legal settlements in the US, South Korea and elsewhere affecting Google Play’s billing policies, fees and business model.
Both point the same direction: a share of consumer spending is migrating off store billing rails. That spending is real, but it stops being visible in store-derived datasets the moment it moves — which means published gross figures like the $167 billion will increasingly understate consumer spending on apps rather than overstate it. Anyone modelling the market from store data in 2027 will be modelling a shrinking share of it.
Alex Rivera: Developers have wanted this outcome for a decade and are discovering that winning it is expensive. Off-store checkout means you own payments, chargebacks, tax remittance in every jurisdiction you sell into, refunds, and the conversion loss from pushing a user out to a browser. The 30% was never purely rent — some of it bought a genuinely frictionless one-tap purchase. The teams capturing real margin from the ruling are the large subscription businesses with existing web billing. For a small publisher, the honest maths often still favours staying in the store.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure on this page was retrieved from a primary source during the production session on August 11, 2026, and each is recorded in the accompanying CSV with source organisation, document, URL and retrieval date. Market-level app economy figures come from Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 report and its State of AI 2026 report. Company financials come from Form 10-K filings retrieved directly from SEC EDGAR (Apple, fiscal year ended September 27, 2025; Alphabet, fiscal year ended December 31, 2025) and from AppLovin’s audited full-year 2025 results release. No figure on this page originates from a secondary aggregator, and no figure originates from model recall.
Definitions. “Gross” revenue is inclusive of the commission taken by Apple and Google. Sensor Tower’s download estimates count one download per Apple or Google account. Its coverage spans the iOS App Store and Google Play only, excludes third-party Android stores, and covers China Mainland on iOS only.
Formulas. All Axis-calculated figures are derived by explicit arithmetic disclosed at the point of use: AYI = (gross revenue ÷ hours spent) × 1,000; revenue per download = gross revenue ÷ downloads; 2024 baselines = 2025 published value ÷ (1 + published growth rate). Every calculation was executed and verified before drafting, and each derived row in the CSV carries axis_calculated = yes with a method note.
Validation. Our reconstruction of downloads per minute (283,486) and dollars per minute ($317,732) from the annual totals matches Sensor Tower’s independently published per-minute figures (284,000 and $318,000) to within rounding, confirming that the inputs used here are internally consistent with the source.
Scope. Store-billed revenue only. In-app advertising revenue is discussed at company level but is not included in any market total on this page, because no comparable global figure exists on the same measurement basis. Segment AYI readings are published only where revenue and hours are reported for the same population; where a category publishes one but not the other, no reading is computed. Where a source states a threshold (“exceeded $5 billion”), the derived figure is labelled as a floor.
About This Dataset
Title: Mobile App Revenue Statistics 2026 — Axis Intelligence Research Fact Table
File: mobile-app-revenue-statistics-2026.csv
Coverage: Calendar years 2024–2025, with H1 2026 forward indicators; worldwide, with United States detail Rows: One observation per row, with full provenance columns
Licence: CC BY 4.0 — free to reuse, redistribute and adapt with attribution
The AYI™ (Attention Yield Index) is an original metric of Axis Intelligence Research, published under CC BY 4.0. The formula, inputs and version are disclosed in full above so that any reader can reproduce the readings independently.
How to Cite This Page
APA: Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Mobile app revenue statistics 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/mobile-app-revenue-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research. “Mobile App Revenue Statistics 2026.” Axis Intelligence, 11 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/mobile-app-revenue-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research. “Mobile App Revenue Statistics 2026.” Axis Intelligence. Last modified August 11, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/mobile-app-revenue-statistics/.
Dataset: Axis Intelligence Research, Mobile App Revenue Statistics 2026, 2026. CC BY 4.0.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the $167 billion figure gross or net of app store commission?
Gross. Sensor Tower states explicitly that its in-app purchase revenue estimates are inclusive of any percentage taken by the app stores. Developer net receipts are materially lower — the exact amount depends on each publisher’s commission tier, jurisdiction and billing route, which is why no credible single “developer net” figure exists for the whole market.
Does mobile app revenue include in-app advertising?
No — and this is the single most common error in market sizing. The $167 billion covers paid downloads, in-app purchases and subscriptions billed through Apple and Google. Ad-funded revenue is excluded entirely, which means hypercasual games and most social apps are drastically under-represented in it.
Why does China appear smaller than expected in app revenue data?
Because Android in China runs on third-party stores — Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo — that no Western measurement panel tracks. Sensor Tower’s China Mainland figures are iOS only. Any global ranking built on iOS plus Google Play structurally understates China, and readers should treat China’s position in these tables as a floor.
What is the AYI™ and why not just use ARPU?
AYI (Attention Yield Index) measures gross revenue per 1,000 hours of app use. ARPU measures revenue per user. They answer different questions: ARPU tells you what a user is worth, AYI tells you how efficiently a category converts the time it captures. In a market where installs are flat and hours are the scarce resource, AYI is the ratio that moves — and it is the one that exposed generative AI’s 3.31× monetisation advantage over the market.
If non-game apps now outearn games, are mobile games in decline?
No. Games grew in-app purchase revenue for a third consecutive year in 2025, at 1.3%, while game downloads fell — that is a market expanding lifetime value from a stable base, not a contracting one. Games also capture ad revenue that the $81.8 billion figure excludes, so their true commercial share is understated by the comparison.
How much does a typical app developer earn?
Not the market average. In 2025, 92% of in-app purchase revenue went to the top 1% of publishers, leaving $13.1 billion for the remaining 99%. The revenue threshold to enter the top 1% is roughly $5 million a year. Developers modelling market share should anchor to the $13.1 billion pool, not the $167 billion headline.
Will the Epic and DMA rulings reduce Apple’s and Google’s app revenue?
They already reduce commission on any purchase routed outside store billing in the affected jurisdictions. Apple’s fiscal 2025 10-K discloses a US court order barring it from charging any commission or fee on out-of-app purchases, and a €500 million DMA fine with a cease-and-desist order in the EU. Both are under appeal, so the scale of the effect is unsettled — but the direction is not.
Which app made the most money in 2025?
TikTok led gross in-app purchase revenue, followed by Google One, with ChatGPT third at $3.4 billion — no app has ever reached $3 billion in annual in-app purchase revenue faster. Eighteen apps crossed $1 billion in 2025, evenly split between games and non-games.
Is app revenue growth expected to continue in 2026?
The forward indicators point up. AI in-app purchase revenue is projected to exceed $4 billion in H1 2026 alone, 36% above H2 2025, and AppLovin guided Q1 2026 revenue to $1.745–1.775 billion after a 70% growth year. The offsetting force is measurement rather than demand: as spending migrates to off-store billing under the US and EU rulings, store-derived totals will capture a shrinking share of what consumers actually spend.