The median subscription app earns about $72 a month in revenue during its first year, according to RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps 2026 report, which analyzed more than 115,000 apps and $16 billion in revenue from 2025. That figure sits far below the $167 billion Sensor Tower says the whole app economy generated in 2025: most of that spending concentrates in a small share of apps, and the typical app earns closer to grocery money than the headline totals suggest.
How much revenue does the average app actually generate?
A year after launch, the typical subscription app is a small business, not a hit. RevenueCat’s 2026 report puts cross-category median monthly revenue at roughly $72 one year post-launch, with a median realized lifetime value of $23 per paying customer over that first year. The picture changes fast once you move up the distribution: the top quartile of apps earns $429 or more a month, and the top 10% clear $2,500 or more, a gap of more than 34 times between the top decile and the median.
Figure 1: Monthly revenue one year after launch, by percentile. Source: RevenueCat, State of Subscription Apps 2026.
| Percentile | Monthly revenue, year 1 | Multiple of median |
|---|---|---|
| Top 10% | $2,500+ | 34.7x |
| Top quartile | $429+ | 6.0x |
| Median (all apps) | $72 | 1x |
Source: RevenueCat, State of Subscription Apps 2026, based on 115,000+ apps and $16 billion in revenue from 2025.
Regional spread widens the picture further. Median first-year lifetime value per payer reaches $32 in North America but only $14 across India and Southeast Asia, and RevenueCat’s dataset only includes apps with active subscription revenue that met a minimum installs-or-revenue threshold and use RevenueCat for subscription management, so it skews toward apps monetizing seriously enough to be measurable, not every app in existence. Even inside that filtered set, the gap between a median app and a top-decile app is enormous.
Revenue at the top of the market is real. Revenue for a typical app is closer to a side income than a business.
Why do older apps still dominate app revenue?
Apps launched before 2020 still capture 69% of all subscription revenue in RevenueCat’s 2026 dataset, despite years of new app launches competing for the same downloads. That is not because new apps stop launching; it is because incumbency compounds. An app with five years of retained payers, refined pricing, and accumulated App Store reviews starts every new year with a revenue base a brand-new competitor does not have.
Figure 2: Subscription revenue split by app launch era. Source: RevenueCat, State of Subscription Apps 2026.
Growth still happens, just unevenly. The top 25% of apps by growth added 80% or more in monthly recurring revenue year over year, while the bottom 25% shrank 33% over the same period, and the cross-category median MRR growth rate landed at just 5.3%. New apps also compete against a stricter review bar than incumbents cleared years ago: Apple rejected roughly 22% of the 9.1 million-plus App Store submissions it evaluated in 2025, per our App Store rejection breakdown, so a new entrant has to clear a harder gate before it can even start building the revenue history that older apps already have. Download volume by country tells a related story about where those new entrants are competing hardest for users, though a full country-by-country download breakdown is its own report we have not published yet.
An app that survives long enough to become an incumbent gets easier to run, not harder. The hard part is surviving the first few years at all.
How many app downloads actually turn into paying customers?
Getting from a download to a paying customer is the narrowest part of the funnel. RevenueCat’s data shows a global median download-to-trial rate of 5.2%, meaning fewer than 1 in 19 people who install an app ever start a trial. From there, trial-to-paid conversion depends heavily on trial length: 42.5% for trials running 17 to 32 days, 37.4% for 5-to-9-day trials, and just 25.5% for trials of 4 days or less. Cancellations cluster early, too: 55.4% of all 3-day-trial cancellations happen on day zero, before the trial has even really started.
Figure 3: The download-to-paid funnel. Source: RevenueCat, State of Subscription Apps 2026.
Paywall design changes the math directly. Apps that require payment before any free use convert 10.7% of downloads to paid within 35 days, versus a 2.1% median for freemium apps that let users try before paying, a more than fivefold gap. Revenue per install also climbs the longer a user sticks around: the cross-category median sits at $0.23 by day 14 and rises to $0.34 by day 60, though that rises to $0.55 in North America and falls to $0.11 across India and Southeast Asia.
Figure 4: Revenue per install growing across the first 60 days. Source: RevenueCat, State of Subscription Apps 2026.
Most of that day-zero cancellation traces back to users who did not fully understand what they had agreed to when the trial started, not to the product itself. A clear, front-loaded EULA generator that states exactly when a trial ends and a card gets charged does not fix a weak product, but it does cut down on the surprise cancellations and chargebacks that come from billing terms nobody actually read.
Conversion is a series of narrow gates, and the gate a developer controls most directly, trial length and paywall placement, moves the numbers more than almost anything else in the funnel.
How much do mobile games make in 2026?
Games remain one of the largest single categories inside the broader app economy. Global consumer spending on mobile games reached $6.1 billion in June 2026 alone, down 7% from the prior month, according to Sensor Tower, following a full year in which games generated roughly $82 billion of 2025’s $167 billion in total app spending, per the same firm’s State of Mobile 2026 report. Spending concentrates geographically the same way it concentrates by app: the United States accounted for 30% of June 2026’s games revenue, followed by China’s iOS market at 15.7% and Japan at 12.1%.
Figure 5: Key data publication milestones behind the figures in this report. Sources: Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2026; RevenueCat, State of Subscription Apps 2026.
| Country | Share of June 2026 mobile game spend |
|---|---|
| United States | 30% |
| China (iOS only) | 15.7% |
| Japan | 12.1% |
| Rest of world | 42.2% |
Source: Sensor Tower, “Top 10 Worldwide Mobile Games by Revenue and Downloads in June 2026.”
For the full breakdown of the $167 billion app economy, including how the Apple App Store and Google Play split that total, see our App Store downloads and revenue report.
Games still move a large amount of money every month, but a single month’s 7% swing shows how volatile that revenue can be compared to the slower, compounding growth pattern behind the incumbent apps described above.
The Bottom Line
Two numbers describe the app economy in 2026, and they describe two different markets. One is $167 billion in total 2025 consumer spending, a headline that keeps growing. The other is $72, the median monthly revenue a real subscription app earns a year after launch, according to RevenueCat’s analysis of 115,000-plus apps. Almost all of the gap between those numbers sits in a small number of apps, mostly older ones, that have compounded years of retained payers into revenue new entrants cannot match on day one. For a developer building something new, the practical read is that revenue is a multi-year outcome, not a launch-week one, and getting the parts you control (trial length, paywall design, and a EULA that sets clear billing expectations before day zero) right matters more when the base rate for a typical app is this modest.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much money does the average app make in a year? The median subscription app earns about $72 a month in revenue during its first year after launch, and roughly $23 in lifetime value per paying customer over that same first year, according to RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps 2026 report, which analyzed more than 115,000 apps and $16 billion in revenue from 2025.
What percentage of app downloads become paying customers? About 2.0% of downloads convert to a paid subscription within 35 days, the global median RevenueCat found across its 2025 dataset. Apps that require payment before any free use convert at 10.7%, more than five times the 2.1% median for apps that let users try free first.
Do older apps earn more than newly launched apps? Yes. Apps launched before 2020 still account for 69% of all subscription revenue tracked in RevenueCat’s 2026 report. The top 25% of apps by growth added 80% more monthly recurring revenue year over year, while the bottom 25% shrank 33% over the same period.
How much do mobile games make? Global consumer spending on mobile games reached $6.1 billion in June 2026 alone, down 7% from the prior month, according to Sensor Tower. The United States accounted for 30% of that spending, followed by China’s iOS market at 15.7% and Japan at 12.1%.
Sources and References
- RevenueCat. (2026). “State of Subscription Apps 2026.” Analysis of 115,000+ apps, $16 billion in revenue, and 1 billion-plus transactions, target time frame 2025.
- Sensor Tower. (2026). “2026 State of Mobile: AI Moves Mobile into Its Next Phase.” Full-year 2025 downloads, revenue, and category data.
- Sensor Tower. (2026). “Top 10 Worldwide Mobile Games by Revenue and Downloads in June 2026.” Country-level consumer spend breakdown.
- Apple Newsroom. (2026). “Apple’s Global App Store Ecosystem and Its Growth 2025.” App Store submission and rejection context, published June 2026.
Note: All figures verified as of September 2026. Subscription-app revenue and conversion figures update on each firm’s own annual and monthly reporting cycle, so headline figures here are refreshed at least twice a year.
