This Week in Apps - Coming Soon
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. Analyzing the Nearly 1,000 Apps and Games that are "Coming Soon"
You may not know this, but there's a way to see which apps have been approved for release by Apple but have not been released yet. We call those "Coming soon" and show those in a new report we've recently soft launched, and you can see them all with Appfigures Explorer.
I was curious to see what's coming soon so I analyzed every app and game that have a future release date and here's what I found.
There are currently 880 apps and games slated for release in the future. I know what your next thought is: "it's all games", right? no. Not exactly.
52% of the "coming soon" group is made of games, where role playing, adventure, and simulation games are in the lead. Fun find: 8 new casino games are coming soon. I thought casino games was a saturated enough category.
On the apps side, utilities are by far the biggest category, having a 49% share of all apps coming soon. Business, lifestyle, and entertainment follow, but with much smaller numbers. And if you're curious, there are a few new AI apps coming soon, but they're not a big enough group.
The last item I was curious about is monetization, and if you're guessing most are not paid upfront you'd be wrong. None are paid upfront. In fact, most are completely free. We'll be able to tell if they monetize with ads after they become available in the App Store.
Subscriptions currently count for about 10% of the total and in-app purchases for 13%.
Why is this important? Knowing what's coming is incredibly helpful in understanding trends ahead of them actually happening. It's like knowing the future. It's also great for knowing if a competitor is about to release a new app or game to not be caught by surprise.
2. ChatGPT Crosses a Major Milestone in the Face of Competition
ChatGPT has been on an astounding growth journey that hasn't slowed down even though local and international rivals stole the spotlight for a bit over the last few months.
Spotlight or not, ChatGPT's mobile revenue continued to rise in February and even set a new monthly all-time high.
I've been following ChatGPT's revenue ever since it launched back in 2023. Now, 22 months later, ChatGPT has reached a big milestone - $100M of consumer spending across the App Store and Google Play, according to Appfigures estimates.
That's the most the app has ever earned in a single month.
How fast did we get here?
- $1M - 12 days
- $10M - 8 months
- $25M - 13 months
- $50M - 17 months
- $100M - 22 months
Since its launch, we estimate that ChatGPT saw $725M of consumer spending mainly coming from the App Store, which drove 81% of that revenue. The US is ChatGPT's biggest driver of revenue across both stores and is responsible for 38% of App Store revenue and 27% of Google Play revenue.
Which means, there's so much more room for ChatGPT to expand.
Grok's in the Arena
Lots of companies are trying to take some of that growth. One of those is xAI with Grok, which has grown substantially since its release in February.
According to our estimates, Grok's first 30 days of monetization resulted in $2.7M of consumer spending in the App Store alone (because Grok hasn't fully launched on Google Play yet).
That's very similar to ChatGPT's growth begging for the obvious question: can Grok grow at the same rate as ChatGPT? Given where the market is right now - AI is no longer "new", there's lots of competition, and ChatGPT already exists - I think it'll be considerably harder for Grok to grow as fast. But that doesn't mean it won't.
3. The King of Game Revenue Lost Its Crown (Again) - The Highest Earning Games in the World
It's not all that often that we see this much movement at the pinnacle of the top earning mobile games, so let's get into what our estimates showed for the second month of 2025. Hint: there's a new #1 in town.
There was a time when Honor of Kings, the highest earning mobile game ever, sat atop the charts, utterly unchallenged for its throne month after month. As more mobile gamers have entered the market bringing with them new tastes, and a greater volume of spending has started flowing from Western markets, it's not uncommon to see Tencent's hyper-successful MOBA drop from #1 every now and then. It's less common to see it drop nearly out of the top five, but it did so last month, having just reclaimed the crown in January.
In its place was Last War: Survival, a combination base builder and zombie shooter that has leveraged its compelling mix of gameplay into increasing popularity. In fact, it did well enough to climb from #5 in January to #1 last month.
Moving down the ranking, the #2 slot remained occupied by Scopely's remarkably successful Monopoly Go. The title has really leveled up (sorry, couldn't resist the pun) the publisher's fortunes, to the point where it was recently able to land the rights to Pokémon Go from Niantic. With its acumen for anticipating what players want and promotional prowess, we look forward to seeing if Scopely can bring the location-based monster-catching title back into the revenue top 10 where it historically spent so much time.
January's #3 earning game Royal Match was also dethroned, with survival strategy title Whiteout Survival moving into its spot. Royal Match slid (presumably on ice) down to #5 in February's ranking, right below where Honor of Kings ended up at #4.
Having crossed $1B in gross player spending for the first time in January, the top 10 earning games saw their revenue continue to climb in February to almost $1.1B before the app stores took their cuts.
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4. A New Shakeup at the Top - The Most Downloaded Games in the World
Between the top downloaded and highest earning charts, it's the former that typically sees the most turnover as games that've held a long-standing spot at #10 or higher finally slip and cede ground to a new batch of popular titles. That's definitely what happened in February, as four fresh games entered the top 10 by downloads globally, knocking some well-known names down the rankings, and with one making the top five.
Despite the shakeup that happened down-chart, SYBO's unstoppable Subway Surfers remained steady at #1 overall. The game has more or less become one every new smartphone owner — especially on Android — knows about and downloads when they start browsing the app stores for the first time.
#2 Block Blast is one of those aforementioned titles that manages to cling to a top spot for months or even years in some cases, and in February it stayed put, as did #3 Roblox. It's worth noting that while these games didn't slip in the ranking, they both saw about 3M fewer downloads last month than they did in January. We'll talk a little more about the overall performance of the top 10 in a moment.
First, however, there was a new title at #4 last month — 456 Run Challenge from Amobear Studio. Its sudden debut so high on the rankings shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given it's an unofficial take on the premise of Squid Game and named after its central character, Player 456. It edged out another popular, but well established, hyper casual title that landed at #5, Hole.io from Voodoo.
We mentioned both Block Blast and Roblox posting lower total downloads in February versus the first month of 2025, and that actually was true for the top 10 overall. In total, the combined App Store and Google Play top 10 equaled 130M estimated downloads, representing a drop of about 7% from the 140M downloads the highest ranking games accounted for in January.
5. Canva is Rumored to be Going Public Soon - Do the Numbers Support It?
Over the last few years, several apps have managed to grow their revenue quietly, in a way that's worth of praise. LinkedIn is on the list, as are Audible and YouTube Music. Aaaaaand, Canva.
The graphic design app has seen meteoric growth in the last few years, and that's probably why there are rumors of an upcoming IPO.
Just how big is Canva on mobile?
According to Appfigures Intelligence, Canva earned $84M of net revenue in Q4 of 2024. Net means what the company gets to keep after Apple and Google take their fees.
That was Canva's biggest quarter of revenue and it comes after consecutive quarters of growth, but, Canva's mobile revenue has grown every single quarter since 2020. Our estimates show Canva grew its revenue 38% in 2024, and 2,000% since 2020.
In 2024, 81% of Canva's revenue came from the App Store in the US, where Canva is currently ranked 34th on the Top Grossing chart. It hasn't caught as much traction on Google Play, where Canva is ranked 97th in the Top Grossing chart which means there's more room for growth.
Canva's most popular competitor, Adobe Express, might have the brand recognition but it doesn't have the revenue. According to our estimates, Adobe Express earned just $1.9M of net revenue from the App Store and Google Play. It's not little, but it's a whole order of magnitude lower than Canva's.
The real question is, will this amazing growth continue after Canva's IPO?
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.
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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.
