Research firm SensorTower has published its latest figures on the mobile apps and games industry, and they suggest strong growth even though we’re now a decade in to the modern apps era. “App Store and Google Play users spent a combined $34.4 billion on mobile apps and games in the first half of this year,” claims its report. “This figure represents a year-over-year increase of 27.8 percent over the first half of 2017, when consumers spent a combined $26.9 billion on both stores.”
SensorTower also splits out these figures by platform, claiming that Apple’s App Store generated $22.6bn of consumer spending in the first half of this year, compared to $11.8bn for Android’s Google Play store. This, despite the fact that the stores’ respective downloads were 15bn and 36bn in that time. This isn’t a new trend though: Android has outstripped iOS for downloads while lagging behind it for spending consistently in recent years.
“Apple’s platform earned more than double the revenue of Google’s with fewer than half as many downloads,” as SensorTower summarises the latest figures. This is still a market driven by gaming: in fact, games accounted for 78% of total spending across both stores in the first half of this year. Note: these figures don’t include in-app spending on mobile commerce: purchases through Amazon’s app or rides paid for through Uber’s app, for example, don’t count.
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