The Consumer App market surpassed Mobile Gaming

Finally. Finally, consumer apps are bigger than gaming in terms of in-app revenues. Not only is this market huge ($100bn +), but it's still growing fast (20% YoY) and everywhere (every country and every vertical).

Written by

Vincent Hart de Keating

CEO and Co-Founder

Published on

December 30, 2024

Consumer Apps represent over 50% of the iOS mobile consumer spend as of Q4 2024.

Sensor Tower's latest report shows a market share of 49.7% for consumer apps on iOS. As of today, it’s the case only on iOS and not on Android.

Looking at historical data, we see that the gaming market is stable, while consumer apps have been growing steadily in the last 5 years.

*Source: Kovalee, using Sensor Tower data.*

Consumer Apps: a $100 B+ market growing 20% YoY

It is not common to see such a big market growing at this pace. About the market size, you might be surprised by the number of $100 billion.

Indeed, the quarterly figures show $13.14 billion in revenue on iOS and $4.60 billion on Android, totaling $17.74 billion for Q3. Extrapolating this to an annual basis, the market size would amount to approximately $71 billion.

However, it’s important to note that Sensor Tower doesn’t have access to all the revenues of the mobile apps, only the trackable revenues reported by Apple and Google. It excludes for instance all revenues coming from web payment and credit card.

Spotify, for instance, reported $14.3 billion in revenue for 2023 (€13.247 billion, according to their annual report). With 80% of Spotify’s usage occurring on mobile, this translates to approximately $11.4 billion in mobile-generated revenue. However, Sensor Tower’s data for Spotify’s 2023 revenue accounts for only $105 million.

Likewise, Bumble had $1 billion in revenue for 2023, compared to the $464 million recorded by Sensor Tower.

Calm reported $596 million in revenue for 2023 (source: GetLatka.com), whereas Sensor Tower recorded only $77 million for the same period.

As mentioned above and illustrated with examples, $70 billion in revenues tracked by Sensor Tower, it’s safe to assume that the actual market size exceeds $100 billion annually.

As a side note, we consider Sensor Tower the most reliable source of data when it comes to mobile apps and a great product. It’s just impossible to be 100% accurate when you don’t have access to all revenue sources.

How does this massive growth compare with other trending industries?

*Sources: *Statista, **Sensor Tower + Kovalee analysis*

The consumer app market is growing at a faster pace than most of the 100bn+ markets.

The consumer app market is growing steadily across countries and verticals.

Consumer apps are growing in most of the countries. +13% YoY in the US 🇺🇸, +9% in China 🇨🇳 and +25% in Europe 🇪🇺 overall. It’s growing fast, and it’s growing everywhere.

The market has a healthy distribution between verticals and is growing. All in all, the latest Sensor Tower report confirms the strong health of the consumer app market.

The consumer app market is big and healthy, with thousands of talented app creators bringing value to the end users. Kovalee is here to support those creators and get their apps to outperform.

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