The Mobile games market is one of the biggest markets and it’s expecting 254 new million users by 2024. Sensor Tower, the popular analytics and insights company published a new report about U.S. iPhone users’ spending. In 2019, consumer spending per active iPhone reached a new milestone in the United States. The average amount spent on in-app purchases (IAP) and premium apps reaching an estimated $100 for the first time. This is $21 more than the average spending in 2018, which was $79.
Mobile games grew significantly last year
When we look at the charts, we see that mobile games represented close to 54 percent of U.S. per-device spending in apps last year. In 2018, estimated spending was $44 while in 2019 it was $35.80, which is 22 percent growth. The top five categories are Games, Entertainment, Photo & Video, Music, and Lifestyle, respectively. According to Sensor Towers, all of these category-leading apps rely primarily on subscriptions for monetization. Also, App Store users have spent an estimated $3.6 billion in the platform’s top 100 subscription-based apps during 2019 alone.
The team expects that mobile games and more types of apps will continue to adopt subscriptions as a primary form of monetization. In the report, Randy Nelson, Head of Mobile Insights said the following:
Developers are discovering that subscriptions enable them to derive greater revenue from their hard-won user bases than traditional ways. Such as one-off IAP or premium price tags, given their apps are a good fit for this type of monetization. This is borne out by our findings that categories populated with prominent subscription-based apps display the largest Y/Y gains in per-device spending.
About this report
All the figures and information above does not include spending in commerce applications. For example, orders from Amazon or rideshare apps like Uber were not included. What was included in this report is the purchases that were processed directly through Apple and the App Store. As a result, we can say that Apple’s iOS is worth focusing on.
