The subscription financial system helped enhance cell app revenues in 2025, at the same time as app downloads declined for the fifth consecutive 12 months, in response to app intelligence agency Appfigures‘ annual report. In 2025, world downloads of all cell apps and cell video games through the App Retailer and Google Play reached an estimated 106.9 billion, 2.7% decrease than the 12 months prior. Shopper spending, in the meantime, climbed 21.6% to achieve an estimated $155.8 billion throughout the identical interval.
The info signifies that app builders, entrepreneurs, and publishers have been profitable in getting their customers to make in-app purchases or activate subscriptions, even because the variety of new customers downloading apps has been falling.
The report additionally mirrored the continued shift away from cell video games as the first income driver for the app financial system. In 2025, customers spent $72.2 billion on cell video games, accounting for about 46% of all spending inside cell apps. Whereas that determine is up 10% year-over-year, spending on non-game cell apps additionally elevated. In reality, non-game app spending is up 33.9% year-over-year and reached $82.6 billion in 2025, Appfigures stated.
Whereas customers could not like that just about each app now has in-app purchases or a subscription mannequin inbuilt, this has provided a extra sustainable path for app builders. Plus, the shift towards ongoing funds for apps has helped gasoline an ecosystem of companies serving the cell app ecosystem. This contains subscription administration platform RevenueCat, which raised a $50 million Sequence C this previous 12 months, and Appcharge, a startup serving to cell video games enhance their monetization, which introduced a $58 million Sequence B again in August. This week, Liftoff Cell, which helps market and monetize apps, filed for an IPO.
As income rose, downloads dropped once more in 2025.
After reaching an all-time excessive of 135 billion in 2020 in the course of the pandemic, downloads have been on the decline. This 12 months’s determine of 106.9 billion installs was down from 109.8 billion in 2024, and follows slowed obtain development between 2023 and 2024, when installs had been down 3.3%.
Cell recreation downloads noticed a bigger decline this 12 months. In 2025, cell video games had been downloaded 39.4 billion occasions, down 8.6% year-over-year, after a 6.6% decline from 2023 to 2024. Non-game app downloads had been basically flat — they solely noticed a slight enhance of 1.1% year-over-year, reaching 67.4 billion.
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The total report additionally takes a have a look at the U.S. market particularly. Right here, customers spent an estimated $55.5 billion throughout all cell apps, up 18.1% year-over-year from $47 billion in 2024. Downloads reached 10 billion, down 4.2% from the ten.4 billion in 2024. U.S. customers spent $33.6 billion on non-game apps, up 26.8% year-over-year, and spent $21.9 billion on video games, up simply 6.8%.
U.S. non-game app downloads had been an estimated 7.1 billion in 2025, whereas video games had been downloaded 2.9 billion occasions.
