Spotify is the second top mobile app by all-time, global consumer spend, according to a new report from analytics firm App Annie. Pandora is the third, meanwhile, with the two music-streaming services only beaten by Netflix in the company’s all-time rankings – based on spending within Apple’s App Store and Android’s Google Play store between July 2010 and May 2018.
Caveats? A few. These are the top non-gaming apps, since App Annie separates off the multi-billion-dollar likes of Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga and Monster Strike in their own chart. Also you can quibble with the ‘all-time’ tag since the data used for the charts starts in July 2010, rather than two years earlier when both app stores launched.
Still, it’s useful to gauge how Spotify and Pandora stack up against other non-game, non-music apps in the top 10: Tencent Video, Tinder, Line, iQIYI, HBO Now, Kwai and QQ make up the rest of the chart for spending. App Annie also has some historic yearly charts: Pandora was the top non-game app by consumer spend in 2013 and 2014, then Spotify replaced it in 2015 and 2016, before Netflix took the top spot in 2017.
Curiously, for 2018 so far, Spotify has dropped out of the top 10 by App Annie’s calculations, although YouTube is in at number seven. Spotify’s number of premium subscribers has been growing rapidly, as we’ve reported regularly, but App Annie’s stats would only track those who are paying via in-app purchases, as opposed to paying Spotify directly.
More generally, the report suggests that mobile games accounted for 31% of the 30.5bn iOS App Store downloads in 2017, but 75% of the $42.5bn consumer spending through that store. That means the non-game apps market on iOS is worth around $10.6bn a year. There’s also a usage stat: iPhone owners average around 100 installed apps, of which they use around 40 every month.
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