Mobile App Revenue in 2025
Scharon Harding (Hacker News):
If you’re frustrated by some of your favorite apps pestering you to sign up for a subscription, some new data may help you empathize with their developers more. According to revenue data from “over 75,000" mobile apps, the vast majority have a hard time making $1,000 per month.
The data is detailed in RevenueCat’s 2025 State of Subscription Apps report. RevenueCat makes a mobile app subscription tool kit and gathered the report’s data from apps using its platform.
[…]
Some app categories with the smallest percentage of newly launched apps hitting the $1,000 mark are shopping, travel, and utilities. Photo, video, and gaming apps are the most likely to hit $1,000/month within two years.
The gap between winners and the rest is growing – At $8,880 the top 5% of newly launched apps make over 400x as much money after their first year, compared to the bottom 25% who make no more than $19. This gap has grown significantly since last year’s 200x.
However, they are also analyzing more than twice as many apps as last year. Presumably, most of the apps new to the list are towards the bottom in revenue.
Churn hits hard and fast – Nearly 30% of annual subscriptions are canceled in the first month. If you don’t win them back over, at the end of that first year, they’re gone. Retention starts on day one.
Low prices keep users locked in – Most apps with cheap annual plans keep up to 36.0% of users subscribed after a year. High-priced monthly plans? Just 6.7% stick around.
But even 36% retention sounds terrible.
The CPI gap between iOS and Play Store in North America is striking, with iOS CPIs reaching nearly 3x those of Play Store in some categories.
Does this mean that iOS users don’t want more apps? Or that the ad system doesn’t work very well?
Previously:
- Most Subscriptions Apps Do Not Make Money
- More App Store Studies
- 94% of App Store Revenue Comes From the Top 1%
- Over 70% of App Store Purchases Are for Games
- The Shape of the App Store
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I cancelled an accidental App Store Nitro Basic to resub on Discord. Make of that what you will.
What is CPI?
I can certainly say that I rarely every install apps on my phone for a number of reasons:
1. The app store UX is shit. Searching for anything works horribly. Most of the results I get are not what I'm looking for. I don't know if it's because they're transparent sponsored results or if their search algorithm is just garbage. But even if I search for the exact title of an app, often I don't get it as the first or even first three results.
2. Most apps are shovelware garbage. They're full of ads, poorly designed, a crass imitation of another app, or something else. Apple's search algorithm does not allow good apps to bubble to the top, at all.
3. There's no demo mode for apps. I'd love to try out the full functionality of an app for a little while to see if I like it, before committing to buying it. How do I know if it'll solve whatever issue I have until I can actually try out its functionality for myself? In a physical store there might be a sales person to help me and answer questions, or I might be able to interact with the product by virtue of it just being there. In a digital store there has to be something that lets me properly examine it.
These points are largely Apple's fault. I honestly don't know what they could've done to make their app store worse than it already is. The walled garden approach is having the opposite effect that they said it was ostensibly supposed to have: it's keeping good apps out and letting crap apps in, even scam apps. The ability to browse and find apps is awful. Their restrictions stop app developers from innovating.
Apple from 20 years ago could have used their brain power and talent to do an actual good faith attempt at making a good app store. I don't know if they would've succeeded, because old Apple failed at plenty of things, but it would've been nice to see the mentality that brought forth the original iPod or iPhone give it a shot.
However modern Apple obviously doesn't care. The app store is making them massive service revenue thanks to all the scummy companies gaming the system, and as such it's working as intended. Apple can continue to be totally hostile towards 95% of its third party developers, because they don't matter. So long as the big name apps are on board -- you know, the ones that don't have to deal with the shittiness that is app review and just get rubber stamped -- and the scam companies are scamming whales out of their money through psychological manipulation, Apple makes their money.
