Global consumer spending on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store totalled $18.2 billion in the third quarter of 2018, according to a new report from mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower.
Sensor Tower notes that this is a 22.7 percent increase over the $14.8 billion it estimated was spent across both stores in the same quarter of 2017.
In terms of platform breakdown, Sensor Tower says the App Store generated nearly 93 percent more revenue than the Google Play Store during Q3 2018.
Specifically, the firm estimates that 66 percent of overall mobile app revenue last quarter came in from the App Store. This works out to $12 billion in revenue and represents a year-over-year growth of 23.3 percent (up from $9.7 billion in Q3 2017).
Google Play, meanwhile, is estimated to have brought in 6.2 billion worldwide (excluding China) during Q3 2018, marking a 21.5 percent increase from Q3 2017’s $5.1 billion spend.
Sensor Tower says Netflix was the top-earning non-game mobile app for the third consecutive quarter, bringing in an estimated $243.7 million across Android and iOS worldwide. Dating app Tinder and China-only streaming app Tencent Video came were the second and third highest grossing apps worldwide, respectively.
Facebook dominated the most downloaded apps charts with its Whatsapp, Messenger and Facebook social media apps coming in at first, second and third, respectively.
Overall, app installs grew 10.9 percent across both stores to 27.1 billion, up from 24.4 installs in Q3 2017. App installs on Google Play grew from 17.1 to 19.5 billion year-over-year, marking a 14.3 percent increase. On iOS, app installs reached 7.6 billion in Q3 2018, a 3.1 percent from the 7.3 billion first-time downloads from Q3 last year.
Outside of apps, Sensor Tower says that worldwide mobile game spending rose 14.9 percent year-over-year during Q3 2018 to $13.8 billion. In other words, mobile games accounted for 76 percent of all app revenue worldwide across both the App Store and Google Play.
Specifically, the App Store generated $8.5 billion (about 62 percent) of this revenue and grew 12.8 percent from the same quarter last year. Google Play, while only accounting for 38 percent of all mobile game spend (or $5.3 billion), nonetheless demonstrated a stronger revenue growth of 18.4 percent across both platforms during Q3.
Mobile game downloads also rose 2.2 percent year-over-year last quarter to total 9.5 billion on both platforms, with Google Play accounting for 7.2 billion on its own (about 76 percent of all game installs). This is up from 2.4 percent from the seven billion game installs in Q3 2017. App Store game downloads grew 1.6 percent to 2.3 billion, up from 2.2 billion in Q3 2017.
The top three mobile games that generated the most revenue were Honor of Kings (known as Arena of Valor outside of China), Monster Strike and Fate/Grand Order, respectively. The three most downloaded mobile games were Helix Jump, Rise Up and Hello Stars, respectively.
Sensor Tower’s full report can be viewed here.
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