I ranked the highest earning apps in the world in October and I'm happy to share, app revenue rose in October.
Yes, TikTok's still the champion, but you won't believe how much money ChatGPT earned!
TikTok was the highest-earning mobile app in the world in October. Appfigures Intelligence shows it earned $316M after Apple's and Google's fees. Not an all-time high, but a smidge higher than September, and that's not bad considering most money is moving towards AI these days.
ChatGPT was the second highest earner, raking in $187M in estimated net revenue, an increase of $13M over September. Also not an all-time high, but considering the competition and the general dislike of ChatGPT 5, this is good news.
OpenAI has been very active trying to build everything and has shipped a slew of quality of life features in the hopes of getting to the mass market ahead of Grok and Gemini. I expect all competitors to add these as well so the real differentiator will become bigger features like image and video generation, audio generation, and memory management.
We already saw Sora's rise (and fall) playing out right in the App Store and I expect to see more attempts like this from every other flagship AI app in the coming months.
YouTube, Tinder, and Google One round out the top five. Yes, Google One!
Google One's revenue has been growing steadily, reaching an all-time high in October with $109M after store fees, with the majority of revenue coming from Google Play. Yes, Google is using in-app purchases in its own apps vs direct billing.
Side note for developers: Google didn't have to use in-app purchases in Google One. They run the store and can do pretty much whatever they want, something they've done in other apps. I think they chose in-app purchases because they know the friction there is the smallest.
Other than Google One's rise, October was a pretty boring month in revenue with minimal movement. But the holiday season is right around the corner so I expect that to change.
Together, the top 10 highest earning apps in October brought in $1.3B after fees, according to Appfigures Intelligence. It's a rounding error away from September, but we're in the billions again, so that's okay.
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