Apple's iOS App Store continues domination of worldwide mobile app revenue

App analytics firm Sensor Tower is is once again finding that Apple's iOS App Store continues dominating revenue generated tallies, versus the Google Play store — and the lead is only getting bigger.

In a report issued by Sensor Tower on Thursday, the firm that has been tracking App downloads and revenue for nearly a decade continues to point out the massive growth in revenue in the app store led by not just games, but by utilities as well. Apple continues to grow its lead in app monetization over Google, with the App Store earning nearly 93 percent more than Google Play during the quarter.

The report notes that about 66 percent of mobile app revenue was generated by Apple, totaling $12 billion. Google Play is also growing, but not at quite the same rate as apple, increasing 21.5 percent from $5.1 billion to $6.2 billion in the same period.

The gap between the two is the "widest revenue disparity since at least 2014 between the two platforms," according to Sensor Tower.

Google does hold the lead in total installs, though. Google Play has grown from 17.1 billion app installs to 19.5 billion year-over-year — a 14.3 percent growth. At the same time, Apple's installs add up to 7.6 billion in the third quarter, a 3.1 percent growth from 2017's 7.3 billion.

In total, global consumer spending on the App Store and Google Play added up to $18.2 billion during the third quarter.

Netflix was the world's top grossing non-game mobile app for the third consecutive quarter in Q3, bringing in an estimated $243.7 million across both platforms from in-app subscriptions. "Honor of Kings" retained the crown of the world's top grossing app in total.

"Pokemon Go" remains on the charts at fifth in terms of revenue, with Fortnite peaking at ninth place, despite not being on Google Play at all during the data collection period.

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8 Comments

gatorguy

said about 5 years ago

Revealing stat:
Gaming alone was responsible for around 75% of all app revenue combined in the quarter from the two app stores. Those in-app purchases aren't going away, only getting worse. And people are bored or gullible enough (or both) to fall for it.

lkrupp

said about 5 years ago

Can any developer say they make more money on Google Play than the App Store, assuming they develop the same app for both platforms? We used to have the old argument about developers choosing Windows over Mac because of market share. Mac users always got hammered over how much software was available for Windows over the Mac. That same argument was trotted out when the iPhone was announced but that seems to have never been the case with mobile platforms like Android and iOS.

gatorguy

said about 5 years ago

Why would it matter? i think Google will be quite happy with (way) more than $25B gross profit this year from a service that requires little overhead beyond what Google already has in place for other cloud-centric services. That's a massive amount of profit in all honesty. Who cares if someone else made more?

Apple for their part are raking it in by the bucket-loads, easily putting to rest any worries about possible hardware stagnation causing revenues to sag.

But why the discrepancies will be what some her will be writing. Maybe wealthier iPhone owners have more time on their hands to play games, or maybe Android users, being less well off, have better uses for their money than in-app purchases and just don't have the money to waste on them. Or maybe China's iOS users, where Google Play doesn't have a presence, really do spend that much on gaming. Perhaps a combination of all three.

Heck, maybe if you add up all the revenue from all the stores selling Android apps, especially those in China, the Android platform better or equals the App Store in total revenue. Who knows. I've got no idea and haven't been interested enough to look. It doesn't matter since neither company is sharing the wealth with us anyway unless you're a developer, and you better be a gaming one if you want to get rich from it.

At the end of the day there's not a company on the planet that wouldn't love to make a few 10's of $billions with so little effort and overhead as Apple and Google do.

ericthehalfbee

said about 5 years ago

gatorguy said:

Why would it matter? i think Google will be quite happy with (way) more than $25B gross profit this year from a service that requires little overhead beyond what Google already has in place for other cloud-centric services. That's a massive amount of profit in all honesty. Who cares if someone else made more?
Apple for their part are raking it in by the bucket-loads, easily putting to rest any worries about possible hardware stagnation causing revenues to sag.
But why the discrepancies will be what some her will be writing. Maybe wealthier iPhone owners have more time on their hands to play games, or maybe Android users, being less well off, have better uses for their money than in-app purchases and just don't have the money to waste on them. Or maybe China's iOS users, where Google Play doesn't have a presence, really do spend that much on gaming. Perhaps a combination of all three.
Heck, maybe if you add up all the revenue from all the stores selling Android apps, especially those in China, the Android platform better or equals the App Store in total revenue. Who knows. I've got no idea and haven't been interested enough to look. It doesn't matter since neither company is sharing the wealth with us anyway unless you're a developer, and you better be a gaming one if you want to get rich from it.
At the end of the day there's not a company on the planet that wouldn't love to make a few 10's of $billions with so little effort and overhead as Apple and Google do.

Say what?

First off, where did you get $25 billion profit a year for Google? That’s gross revenues, not profit. 30% of that figure gives an actual profit of around $7.5 billion. Nothing to sneeze at, but that’s not what Lkrupp was talking about.

It’s well known (from many developers who have chosen to talk about it publicly) that the iOS version of their App typically makes far more money than the Android version, and that the Android version gets pirated far more often than the iOS version.

This is an important point for developers to consider when choosing to develop a mobile App. And it’s why many choose to go iOS first (or even exclusively). Developers need to make money to offset the investment in creating an App. And their chances of recovering that investment are substantially higher on iOS. This is one reason iOS Apps are superior to Android Apps, especially on tablets.

When revenues are compared to the number of users we see the average iOS user generates 4X as much revenue as the average Android user. This is the important part.

Third party Android App Stores are 100% irrelevant, for reasons I’ve explained in detail before. To sum up: they do absolutely nothing to help the Android ecosystem (better availability of Apps, for example) since they are usually self-contained ecosystems tied to a certain country or carrier.

gatorguy

said about 5 years ago

ericthehalfbee said:

gatorguy said:

Why would it matter? i think Google will be quite happy with (way) more than $25B gross profit this year from a service that requires little overhead beyond what Google already has in place for other cloud-centric services. That's a massive amount of profit in all honesty. Who cares if someone else made more?
Apple for their part are raking it in by the bucket-loads, easily putting to rest any worries about possible hardware stagnation causing revenues to sag.
But why the discrepancies will be what some her will be writing. Maybe wealthier iPhone owners have more time on their hands to play games, or maybe Android users, being less well off, have better uses for their money than in-app purchases and just don't have the money to waste on them. Or maybe China's iOS users, where Google Play doesn't have a presence, really do spend that much on gaming. Perhaps a combination of all three.
Heck, maybe if you add up all the revenue from all the stores selling Android apps, especially those in China, the Android platform better or equals the App Store in total revenue. Who knows. I've got no idea and haven't been interested enough to look. It doesn't matter since neither company is sharing the wealth with us anyway unless you're a developer, and you better be a gaming one if you want to get rich from it.
At the end of the day there's not a company on the planet that wouldn't love to make a few 10's of $billions with so little effort and overhead as Apple and Google do.

Third party Android App Stores are 100% irrelevant, for reasons I’ve explained in detail before. To sum up: they do absolutely nothing to help the Android ecosystem (better availability of Apps, for example) since they are usually self-contained ecosystems tied to a certain country or carrier.

It certainly does in China, whee they wouldn't be buying Android phones by the shipload if they didn't have apps to go along with them... Same with Apple.
but I agree that Google doesn't get to see their 30% cut from it.

And thanks for reining in my profit figures. I should read more carefully sometimes. You're correct that that the studies numbers are gross app revenues, not the portion of revenues flowing to Apple and Google.

And you're right on the second point too: That 30% they get to keep is nothing to sneeze at. Take advantage of it while they can.