For the First Time, Apps Out-Earned Games on Your Phone

For as long as there have been app stores, games have been their biggest money-makers. In 2025, that changed. According to Sensor Tower's State of Mobile 2026 report, published in January 2026, people spent $85.6 billion on non-game apps in the App Store and Google Play, up 21%, and $81.8 billion on mobile games, up only about 1%.

It was the first time non-game apps had out-earned games. The push came from subscriptions to apps such as ChatGPT, the video editor CapCut and the streaming service WeTV. Overall in-app spending reached $167 billion, up 10%.

Games: flat money, falling downloads

The detailed numbers show a market that is mature, if not quite stuck. Mobile game in-app revenue was about $81.75 billion, up 1.3%, the third straight year of small growth. After inflation, analysts note, that is probably a slight fall.

Downloads fell faster. Mobile game downloads dropped 7.2% to about 50.4 billion, and the decline sped up compared with 2024. Google Play accounted for about 42.4 billion of them and the App Store about 7.8 billion. But the App Store earned far more: about $52.5 billion of game revenue, against $30 billion on Google Play.

Time spent in mobile games rose just 0.9%. Fewer new players are arriving, and the ones already playing are not playing much more.

Strategy takes the crown

The biggest earners were strategy games. Last War: Survival from FunFly and Whiteout Survival from Century Games were the two highest-grossing mobile games in the world, followed by Royal Match from Dream Games and Monopoly Go from Scopely.

By genre, strategy games earned $20.2 billion and puzzle games $14.4 billion, the two strongest growth stories. Hybrid-casual games, simple games with deeper progression systems, were the fastest-growing segment, up about 17% to $4.2 billion. RPGs remained among the largest genres but declined.

Tencent was the world's biggest mobile publisher with nearly $8 billion of in-app revenue. Century Games climbed to third, overtaking Scopely late in the year, helped by its new hit Kingshot, which reached seventh in global revenue by December.

The web shop revolution

There is one big reason mobile game revenue may be stronger than the app-store numbers suggest: web shops. More and more publishers now sell in-game currency on their own websites, paying a payment processor a few percent instead of the app store's usual 30%.

Sensor Tower found Supercell's web store was the most visited of any game publisher's in 2025, with about 1.5 billion visits, while Roblox captured about 75% of all visits to game publisher websites. Newzoo, which counts web-shop spending, put the 2025 mobile games market at $113.3 billion, far above Sensor Tower's app-store figure.

Supercell's chief executive Ilkka Paananen summed up the mood in February 2026: the mobile market has grown only about 3% a year over five years, and the industry, in his words, "is not living up to its potential."

Why it matters

Mobile is still the biggest part of the games business, but the app-store data shows it hitting a ceiling. Games are now competing for screen time and spending with AI assistants, short dramas and video tools, and in 2025 those apps won the spending race.

WGC's take: the phone is no longer a games console that happens to make calls. It is a crowded entertainment device where games must fight for attention. The winners in 2025, strategy and hybrid-casual games and publishers with strong web shops, show what that fight looks like. See also our profile of Supercell and the global market guide.

What to watch

• Whether a new mobile game passes $1 billion in 2026; Pokémon TCG Pocket is the favourite.
• Web shop growth as Apple and Google loosen payment rules in more markets.
• Whether AI and other apps keep pulling ahead of games in spending.