This Week in Apps - Minting Millionaires
This Week in Apps is a short, no-fluff, round-up of interesting things that happened in the mobile industry. Here are our top highlights.
U.S. Revenue Index (vs 30 days ago)
Insights
1. The App Store Minted Hundreds of New Millionaires in 2024
People asked me if I think there's still money in apps all the time. I can do better than share my opinion - I have the data to answer the question definitively.
I can show you how app revenue rose in 2024, or how the top apps are crushing it, but instead, I'm going to do something better.
Using Explorer, I discovered all apps and games that were released in 2024 and ended the year with more than $1M in gross revenue. That's enough to get you kicked out of Apple's Small Business Program.
Can you guess how many apps managed to do that (without looking below)?
According to our App Intelligence, 442 apps and games that were released in 2024 ended the year with $1M or more of gross revenue. To put that intp perspective, only 5,059 apps and games earned that much in 2024. This new batch made up 9% of those.
You might be thinking, like me, that it's all games. And you won't be completely wrong but you also won't be right either.
Our data shows that 20% of the new batch of millionaires were apps while 80% were games. I expected apps to be lower, but subscriptions and the overall rising revenue trend in the App Store are even stronger than I expected.
Short drama apps and AI dominated the list on the apps side. We estimate that together, the new batch of millionaires brought in $117M in gross revenue (before store fees) from the App Store in 2024 for an average of $1.3M per app.
Games scored much more though. Our App Intelligence shows the new millionaires brough in $4.8B of gross revenue in 2024. Wow!
More than half of the new millionaires were role playing games (55%). Casual and adventure games tied for second with a 20% share each, with strategy and action rounding out the top 5.
So yes, there's still money to be made with apps and games on the App Store in 2025, but make sure you're building the right thing. We've got something to help with that coming soon.
2. DeepSeek Crossed a Million Downloads and is About to Challenge ChatGPT
A new Large Language Model from Chinese DeepSeek has made the news last week. The model seems to be matching and even beating established competitors across various benchmarks while being much smaller and is open source.
Quite a bundle! But there's more.
DeepSeek launched a mobile app two weeks ago, and so far, it's a hit.
DeepSeek's mobile release is the second one this month - two more new LLM apps than I expected.
Our estimates show that DeepSeek's free app has already been downloaded more than a million times from the App Store and Google Play. Although more downloads came from the App Store (60%), almost as many came from Google Play indicating there's tremendous hunger for AI.
FYI - We'll be publishing an 80+ page industry report on the state of AI apps and the trends shaping 2025 next week. Keep an eye on your inbox if you're in AI or want to get into it.
For context, Grok, Elon's competitor to ChatGPT, still hasn't gotten to 500K downloads. I know it's only available in a tiny number of countries and only on the App Store, but that's no excuse.
I tried DeepSeek's R1 model, which should be competitive with ChatGPT's o1, and I really like the way it reasons.
Looking at where the downloads are coming from, it's clear the appetite for AI is global. And by clear, I mean that the US isn't the top market in terms of downloads on either platform - and that's not common.
China is the top source of downloads for iPhones, having contributed 35% of the downloads since the app was released. The US came second with a 15% share, or roughly 99K downloads as of Thursday.
I had to check the numbers from Google Play twice because they're very unusual - Algeria brought in the most downloads on Google Play followed by Egypt and only then the US. It's worth noting both Algeria and Egypt were also in the top 10 on the App Store side, which is, again, unusual.
As of Sunday, DeepSeek ranks 2nd on the App Store's Top App's chart in the US, right below ChatGPT and ahead of Gemini (29th) and Microsoft Copilot (344th) while Grok and Claude didn't make the top 500.
DeepSeek is the first open source LLM to launch as a mobile app. Let's see if others, like Meta, will do the same, making it harder for commercial apps to grow.
3. $TRUMP Generated 2.5M New Downloads for Crypto Apps in a Single Week
Last weekend, just ahead of his inauguration, Donald Trump surprised the crypto world by rolling out his own meme coin. If you're not familiar, a meme coin is a type of cryptocurrency that derives its value from hype and not from the underlying technology or utility.
The release, which happened on a Friday night, surprised many and the hype caused its price to surge.
The thing is, the coin wasn't available on big platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase. To buy this coin at that time you needed an app called Moonshot.
And as you might expect, downloads of Moonshot exploded. I'm stopping myself from making the obvious pun.
According to our App Intelligence, Moonshot's downloads rose 2,267% between Saturday and Thursday as the coin's value continued to rise. That amounted to 787K downloads of which 754K were above the expected range, based on my calculations.
To put this in context, Moonshot's total downloads prior to the new coin stood at 320K. Half of the new downloads from last week.
Wow.
By Monday, all other crypto apps were trying to join the party. Coinbase and Robinhood announced the coin will be available on their platforms and crypto.com went as far as to include the coin in its app's name - and App Store Optimization tactic.
And just like that, downloads of them all rose. Not nearly as much as Moonshot's, but they're also more established, so the percentage will be lower even if the absolute value is high.
I compared the downloads of Binance, Robinhood, Coinbase, Coinbase Wallet, and Crypto.com. I included both Coinbase and Coinbase Wallet because you need the Wallet app to buy the coin, but most people didn't know that and downloaded the main app.
Coinbase Wallet's downloads rose the most, 182%, with crypto.com right behind it at 124%. App Store Optimization worked! Binance was third with 86% and Robinhood came in last with 45%.
Together, Moonshot and its competitors saw 4.5M downloads last week, and my calculation shows that's roughly 2.5M more downloads than what we expected.
The coin's value has dropped significantly since and so did the downloads, but I'm sure we'll see this happening more often in 2025.
Grow Smarter, with Data.
Affordable tools for ASO, Competitive Intelligence, and Analytics.
4. Explode Wants to Dethrone Snapchat But...
Notorious social growth hacker Nikita Bier released an app that mimics the original Snapchat to "spite Snap" a couple of weeks ago.
The app is called Explode and it lets iPhone users send messages that disappear and cleverly uses App Clips to grow. But its launch numbers surprised me - Explode got around 20K downloads. A one-day spike and an immediate dip.
That led me to ask a very important question - is anyone really looking for a Snapchat replacement in 2025?
I'm using Snapchat's app revenue over the years to answer this question because while downloads are nice, money talks.
And looking at the rate of growth the answer is an overwhelming no. No no no.
According to Appfigures Intelligence, Snapchat's app net revenue reached $103M in Q4 - and that's net, so it's what Snap gets to keep after store fees. The App Store was responsible for the majority of the revenue. It's also where revenue has been growing the most.
But a lot of money doesn't really answer the question. After all, TikTok was bringing in more in one month before it was banned.
This stat will help - between Q1 and Q4, Snapchat's app revenue rose 53%! It started out in the mid-two-digits and ended with three.
Almost every month was higher than its predecessor in 2024, indicating no one's really looking for a Snapchat replacement. Well, maybe one, but that's a really small market for a new app.
Nikita may have built Explode to "spite" Snap. Maybe he built it to get bought. Maybe he built it just for fun. Whatever it is, as long as its selling proposition is to replace Snapchat it'll have a really hard time getting anywhere.
After I finished writing this article, I came across this post from Nikita explaining why the launch failed. He agrees with my conclusion.
5. Revenue Shows Amazon Finally Figured Out Streaming
The streaming race is nothing but done now that everyone realized content is still king. A few apps like Peacock and Paramount+ have seen amazing growth in 2024, but one we don't often talk about is Amazon.
Yes, the same Amazon that will ship your toilet paper faster than you can get it from the store is also streaming, and for a long time, it wasn't really doing all that great. It wasn't failing, it just wasn't really growing.
That changed in 2024, the most active year of releases for the platform that couldn't turn the newest James Bond movie into growth back in 2022.
Amazon Prime Video started 2024 with a little over $22M in net revenue in January, according to our estimates. Net means what Jeff gets to keep after Apple and Google take their fees.
Revenue rose quickly and sharply in 2024 and ended the year at a whopping $36M in December, according to our estimates. That means $14M new net revenue in 2024 for a 63% increase. That's twice as much as the growth Amazon Prime Video saw in 2023 and 6 times more than the increase it saw in 2022.
It's no coincidence that Amazon Prime Video released the most new exclusives that went on to gain lots of praise in 2024, including Fallout, Road House, Five Nights at Freddy's, and Beast Games.
While the US is responsible for the majority of Amazon Prime Video's revenue in 2024 and is the only country in the triple-digit millions, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, the UK, and Canada all contributed double-digit millions.
Content is still king, and everyone seems to want it.
App Intelligence for Everyone!
The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.
Are you a Journalist? You can get access to our app and market intelligence for free through the Appfigures for Journalists program. Contact us for more details.
All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.