Over half of U.S. App Store spending now comes from non-game apps

According to Sensor Tower, iOS users in the United States spent more on non-game apps than games for the first time in the second quarter of 2022.

Per the analysis, 50.3% of consumer spending in the U.S. App Store came from non-game apps in Q2 2022. Five years ago, games accounted for more than two-thirds of total spending in the U.S. App Store. This increase in revenue was due in part to subscriptions, which non-game apps have increasingly adopted over the years. 

Spending in non-game apps has grow at more than twice the rate as games, with non-games achieving a compound annual growth rate of 40% since June 2014, compared to less than 20% for games. 

In the second quarter of 2022, 400 apps generated at least $1 million in consumer spending, a 900 percent increase from 50 apps in the second quarter of 2016.

In the first half of 2022, global consumer spending in mobile apps across Play Store and App Store grew 1% Y/Y and surpassed $65 billion. Although app spending kept rising in the first half of 2022, this wasn’t the case for global app downloads which dropped 1.5% from last year’s 72.3 billion to 71.2 billion in H1 2022.

Global consumer spending in mobile games dropped 6.6% from last year’s $44.1B to $41.2B in the first half of 2022. In the meantime, global mobile game downloads showed a slight upward trend rising 0.4% from 2021’s 28 billion to 28.1 billion in H1 2022.