Most of what we do on our phones happens in apps: messaging, social media, shopping, banking, streaming and, more and more, asking an AI assistant. The average phone user now spends 3.6 hours a day using some kind of mobile app.
But the app market isn’t growing the way it used to. Downloads have levelled off, and the money now comes from getting more out of the people who already use apps. In 2025, for the first time, people spent more in apps than in games.
This guide brings together the latest mobile app market statistics for 2026: the size of the market, consumer spending, downloads, time spent, the number of apps and the biggest markets.
How Big Is the Mobile App Market?
The answer depends on what you count. Consumer spending in the app stores is the narrowest measure. Add the money apps make from advertising and the market is several times bigger.
| Name | Revenue |
|---|---|
| Advertising | |
| In-app purchases | |
| Paid apps |
- The app market will bring in about $810 billion in 2026, Statista projects, counting advertising, in-app purchases and paid apps.
- Advertising makes up about 70% of that, at $565 billion. In-app purchases and subscriptions bring in $241 billion.
- Paid apps are a sliver of the market: $4.4 billion, about half a percent of all app revenue.
- Statista expects the market to grow about 7.8% a year from 2026 to reach $1.18 trillion in 2031.
- People spent $167 billion in apps and games on the App Store and Google Play in 2025, up 10.6%, according to Sensor Tower. That’s about $318,000 a minute.
- Apps on the App Store brought in more than $1.4 trillion in billings and sales in 2025, according to a study for Apple. Most of it, $1.1 trillion, was physical goods and services bought in apps, like groceries, food delivery, shopping and travel.
- The same study puts in-app advertising on the App Store alone at $151 billion, and digital goods and services at $149 billion. Apple says developers paid no commission on more than 90% of all the ecosystem’s billings and sales.
Why the numbers differ
Each tracker measures something different, so their totals aren’t going to line up exactly. Sensor Tower counts what people spend on the App Store and Google Play, before Apple and Google take their cut, and leaves out advertising and China’s third-party Android stores. Statista adds advertising and China’s Android stores. Apple’s figure counts everything bought through apps, including physical goods it doesn’t take a fee on.
The trends point the same way, though. Spending keeps rising, and most app revenue comes from ads and from the people already using an app, not from selling the app itself.
How Much Do People Spend in Apps?
App spending has kept growing even as downloads have stalled. Subscriptions, AI tools and streaming are doing most of the work.
- People spent $167 billion in apps and games on the App Store and Google Play in 2025, up 10.6% from 2024, Sensor Tower says.
- Appfigures, which measures differently, puts 2025 spending at $155.8 billion, up 21.6%, according to TechCrunch. It credits subscriptions for most of the growth.
- Spending reached $43.6 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 5.3% from a year earlier.
- Google Play spending grew 10% in the second quarter of 2026, against 3% on the App Store. The App Store still takes most of the money, as our Android vs iOS breakdown shows.
- The money goes to a small group of publishers. The top 1% took 92% of app store spending in 2025, about $154 billion, and 81% of downloads.
- 18 apps passed $1 billion in yearly spending in 2025, half of them games. ChatGPT was one of three to do it for the first time.
Do Apps or Games Make More Money?
For most of the app stores’ history, games brought in most of the money. That changed in 2025.
| Name | Spending |
|---|---|
| Apps | |
| Games |
- People spent $85.6 billion in non-game apps in 2025, up 21%, and $81.8 billion in games, up 1%, according to Sensor Tower. It was the first year apps out-earned games.
- App spending is now 2.8 times what it was five years earlier.
- The gap is widening. In the second quarter of 2026, spending on apps hit a record $24.4 billion, up 14.6%, while spending on games fell 4.5%.
- Appfigures sees the same shift: $82.6 billion spent in apps in 2025, up 33.9%, against $72.2 billion in games, up 10%.
- AI is the fastest-growing category. Spending in generative AI apps more than tripled in 2025 to more than $5 billion, and it more than doubled again (up 108%) in the second quarter of 2026.
- ChatGPT made $3.4 billion from in-app purchases in 2025, the third most of any app after TikTok and Google One. It made $1.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026 alone.
How Many Apps Are Downloaded Each Year?
App downloads have hit a plateau. Most people already have the apps they use every day, so growth now comes from emerging markets and new categories like AI.
- People downloaded about 149 billion apps and games from the App Store and Google Play in 2025, up 0.8%, according to Sensor Tower. That’s about 284,000 a minute.
- Appfigures counts 106.9 billion downloads in 2025, down 2.7% from 109.8 billion in 2024 and the fifth fall in a row since a peak of 135 billion in 2020.
- Games are losing downloads to apps. Game downloads fell 8.6% in 2025 to 39.4 billion, by Appfigures’ count, while app downloads rose 1.1% to 67.4 billion.
- Non-game apps had 25.5 billion downloads in the second quarter of 2026, more than twice as many as games (11.3 billion), according to Sensor Tower’s figures reported by iThinkDifferent.
- Downloads of generative AI apps doubled in 2025 to 3.8 billion. ChatGPT was the world’s most downloaded app in the second quarter of 2026, ahead of TikTok and Instagram.
How Much Time Do People Spend in Apps?
Time spent in apps is still growing, but slowly. People are sharing their time between more apps rather than spending much more of it.
- 3.6 hours Average time a day each mobile user spent in apps in 2025 Sensor Tower
- 5.3 trillion Hours spent in apps worldwide in 2025, up 3.8% Sensor Tower
- 34 Different apps the average user opened each month in 2025 Sensor Tower
- 2.5 trillion Hours spent in social media apps in 2025, up 5% Sensor Tower
- The average mobile user spent 3.6 hours a day in apps in 2025, up 1.1%, according to Sensor Tower. Across all users, that came to 5.3 trillion hours, up 3.8%.
- People used about 34 different apps a month in 2025, up 5.4%, and about 10 each day.
- Social media takes the biggest share of that time: nearly 2.5 trillion hours in 2025, or more than 90 minutes a day for the average user.
- People spent 48 billion hours in generative AI apps in 2025, about 3.6 times as much as in 2024.
- Time spent in shopping apps grew just 1% in 2025, after growing 10% in each of the two years before.
- Amazon is still the most used shopping app, with 685 million monthly users at the end of 2025. Temu has more than 530 million, up 48%.
Phones aren’t just for apps, of course. For how much of the web’s traffic now comes from phones, see our mobile traffic breakdown.
How Many Apps Are There?
Between them, the two big app stores list more than 5.4 million apps, and almost all of them are free to download.
| App Store | Google Play | |
|---|---|---|
| Apps | 2,758,908 | 2,675,050 |
| Free apps | 95.0% | 97.1% |
| New apps in the past month | 94,702 | 89,199 |
Source: 42matters, November 2, 2026
- There are 2.76 million apps on the App Store and 2.68 million on Google Play, according to 42matters.
- 95% of App Store apps and 97% of Google Play apps are free to download, which is why so little app revenue comes from paid apps.
- Both stores are still growing fast. The App Store added 94,702 new apps in the past month and Google Play 89,199.
- The App Store had more than 850 million weekly users on average in 2025, across 175 countries and regions, Apple says.
For more on how apps are built and used, see our mobile app statistics.
Which Countries Are the Biggest App Markets?
The countries that download the most apps aren’t the ones that spend the most in them. Downloads follow population, while spending follows income.
- The US is the biggest app market by spending. People there spent nearly $60 billion in apps in 2025, according to Sensor Tower. Appfigures puts the figure at $55.5 billion, up 18.1%.
- US spending dipped 3% in the second quarter of 2026, to $14.8 billion, but the US still led every other market.
- Statista expects the US to bring in $321 billion of app revenue in 2026, advertising included, about 40% of the world total.
- India has the most downloads by far. It led Sensor Tower’s 2025 ranking, followed by the US, Brazil and Indonesia, and was one of only two top-10 markets, with Pakistan, where downloads grew.
- India had 6.67 billion downloads in the second quarter of 2026 alone, up 4%.
- The UK, Germany and France drove much of the growth in spending in 2025 and 2026, and together added $500 million in spending in the second quarter of 2026.
What the App Market Statistics Mean for Brands
The app stores are mature. Downloads are flat, people’s time is spread across a few dozen apps, and the biggest publishers take most of the money.
But the figures also show what works. Spending keeps rising because apps are getting more out of the people who already use them, through subscriptions, repeat purchases and apps people open every day. Apple’s study shows the same thing in commerce: $1.1 trillion of physical goods and services were bought in App Store apps in 2025.
For a brand, that means an app isn’t about being discovered in the app store. It’s about giving your best customers a faster way back to you than a browser tab, and a direct line to them through push notifications. With people opening 34 apps a month, the brands on their home screen get the most of their attention.
Launching Your Own App With MobiLoud
MobiLoud transforms your website into a custom mobile app, powered by the same underlying code as your website. We work mostly with mid-market and enterprise brands, helping them launch apps for their best customers, without the cost and complexity of traditional app development.
We build the app from your existing site, so your products, content, checkout and tools just work in the app from day one. Then we design a custom, native interface for the app and add what only an app can do:
- Push notifications that reach your customers on iPhone and Android
- A listing in the App Store and Google Play
- App-only pages your team builds in your own platform
- Native features, SDKs and device integrations where you need them
Because the app feeds from the same code as your website, it stays consistent with your site as it changes. Our team builds, launches and looks after it, so there’s nothing for your team to maintain.
Final Thoughts
The mobile app market is bigger than ever and still growing. People spent $167 billion in the app stores in 2025, and Statista puts the whole market, advertising included, at about $810 billion in 2026.
What’s changed is where the growth comes from. Downloads have stalled, and the money now comes from apps people keep using: subscriptions, AI assistants, streaming, social media and shopping.
For brands, the lesson is the same. The value of an app comes from the customers who keep it on their home screen and come back to it, again and again.
