Subscription App Revenue Is at an All-Time High

I recently gave a keynote at the App Promotion Summit about the state of mobile apps. My overall theme was to highlight that it's getting harder to get downloads but every download is worth more than ever before.

But of my 29 slides, one got the biggest reaction and led to the most "hey, I didn't expect that at all" comments after my talk.

Using Appfigures Intelligence, I looked at all the revenue across the App Store and Google Play in August and divided it into revenue earned by apps utilizing subscriptions vs apps that are paid or have non-recurring in-app purchases.

According to our estimates, 45.4% of all revenue earned came from subscription apps. Even if I didn't have any more data to share, this would be quite amazing. Considering most games haven't cracked subscriptions just yet, this is a very big deal.

And the share is rising. Compared to May, August's number is 1.4% higher, which means the scale will tip towards subscriptions before the end of the year.

Right now, of the top five top-grossing apps and games in the US App Store, only two utilize subscriptions, and three use in-app purchases. Yet subscription apps generate nearly half of all revenue. The top 5 are just a tiny glimpse, but an important one.

But let me add to your shock - can you guess how many apps, of all apps and games available in the App Store and Google Play right now, even use subscriptions?

You might guess "somewhere around half" to align with the revenue, but if that's your guess you'd be veeeeeery off. Very very off.

According to Explorer, 3.9% of all apps and games use subscriptions. Not even 5% of (mostly) apps and (very few) games generate almost half of all revenue. That's significant.

If you've got an app in the store that's using subscriptions you should spend as much time as you can getting more downloads and optimizing the free to paid conversion. And if you're not using subscriptions yet - what are you waiting for???