The COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in mobile app usage in 2020 and 2021. However, now that the vaccine rollout has gone public, mobile app usage is settling down again, but revenue has still gone up.
Sensor Tower’s latest report shows that smartphones users spent a total of $33.6 billion on mobile apps in Q3 this year. This was a collective result of the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store including in-app purchases as well as various subscriptions. This is a 15.1% increase over Q3 2020 where people spent $29.2 in total.
However, the increase has slowed down significantly as 2020 showed a growth of 32% compared to 2019.
Apple’s App Store brought in the most money at an impressive $21.5 billion, which is a 13.2% increase over last year. The Google Play Store fell behind with $12.1 billion, but it was an impressive increase of 18.6%.
TikTok was the highest-earning mobile app overall. It was also the first non-Facebook app to hit 3 billion monthly installs. It was the highest-earning mobile app on the Apple App Store, but Google’s own Google One app took the top spot on the Play Store.
Piccoma shot up to the second position and YouTube and Disney+ also made it to the Top 5 in terms of overall revenue.
Mobile gaming is still on the rise as well with people spending 7.7% more cash than last year at a whopping $22.4 billion. Most of this revenue came from the Google Play Store ($13.1 billion) with iOS App Store trailing behind ($9.3 billion).
PUBG Mobile is still the leader of mobile games in terms of revenue. The game has earned total lifetime earnings of over $5 billion and this includes Game for Peace, the Chinese version of PUBG Mobile. Another Tencent Game Honor for Kings took the second spot and Genshin Impact is on #3 despite being only a year old.
Genshin Impact was also the topmost earning app on the Google Play Store, while Honor for Kings took the lead on iOS App Store.
Source: Sensor Tower
