Where's the Money? Comparing Revenue on the App Store and Google Play

One of the questions I get asked most often is "should I build for the App Store and Google Play?". And while the answer is pretty dependent on what you're building, what I can do is show you how consumer spending is split between the App Store and Google Play and let you make the decision for yourself.

I used our App Intelligence to look at the revenue of the top apps^* in September across the App Store and Google Play and broke it down further into categories because while the big picture is fairly consistent across the board, each category is just a little different.

Let's start with the obvious - there's more money on the App Store. If you've been reading my newsletter for long enough, this shouldn't come as a surprise, but the numbers might be surprising.

Our App Intelligence shows that in September, 16% of all revenue came from purchases on Google Play and 84% from the App Store. That's a really big difference.

That means that for every dollar spent through Google Play there are more than five spent in the App Store!

And speaking of dollars, we estimate that there were $16.2B of those spent by consumers on apps and games in September. Google Play contributed $2.5B to that total and the App Store the remaining $13.7B. Billions with a capital B. And this is all gross revenue, which means what users spent on in-app purchases and before Apple and Google take their fees.

So, if you're strictly looking for money, you may want to focus on the App Store.

Not All Categories Behave the Same

But let's dig deeper to see which categories generate the most revenue and which store leads there. To do that, I ranked all categories by how much money consumers spent in September and ranked the top 10.

And the winner is... Games. On the App Store.

According to our App Intelligence, consumers spent the most on games - $5.1B between the App Store and Google Play. $3.9B, or 75%, came from the App Store, so if you have a game the App Store is the place to be.

Fun fact - Games have the smallest share coming from the App Store when compared to all other categories except for one (Shopping).

In addition to Games, it's Entertainment, Lifestyle & Dating, Social Networking, and Photo & Video that make up the top five categories by total spend. The App Store is responsible for between 83% and 97% of the share across those. That's just wild.

Shopping, which is a tiny category in terms of revenue so it didn't make the top 10 (ranked #21) is the only category where the App Store's share is less than half at 42%. I'm not entirely sure why, but then again, most of the shopping apps don't monetize using in-app purchases so I'm not too surprised. I was surprised to see $30M in consumer spending in it!

There are many reasons to release an app across both platforms, but if revenue is your main goal, start with the App Store. That's what ChatGPT and Claude did, as do many other AI apps. There's a reason for that.

P.S. - The analysis is based on revenue of all ranked apps across each store, country, and category. In many countries apps that aren't ranked don't make any revenue, but in bigger countries like the US some apps are left out. When aggregating, those add up but when looking at individual app revenue it's very little which is why I analyzed revenue in this way.