App downloads decline again in 2025, but consumer spending rises to nearly $156 billion

The subscription economy helped boost mobile app revenue in 2025, even as app downloads fell for a fifth straight year, according to the app intelligence firm. Application forms“Annual Report. In 2025, global downloads of all mobile apps and mobile games across the App Store and Google Play reached an estimated 106.9 billion, 2.7% lower than the previous year. Meanwhile, consumer spending rose 21.6% to an estimated $155.8 billion during the same period.

The data shows that app developers, marketers and publishers have been successful in getting their users to make in-app purchases or activate subscriptions, even as the number of new users downloading apps has declined.

The report also reflects the ongoing shift away from mobile gaming as the primary revenue driver for the app economy. In 2025, consumers spent $72.2 billion on mobile games, representing approximately 46% of all spending within mobile apps. While this number is up 10% year over year, spending on non-gaming mobile apps has also increased. In fact, spending on non-gaming apps rose 33.9% year over year and reached $82.6 billion in 2025, Appfigures said.

While consumers may not like that almost every app now has in-app purchases or a subscription model built in, this has presented a more sustainable path for app developers. Additionally, the shift toward continuous payments for apps has helped strengthen the ecosystem of companies serving the mobile app ecosystem. This includes the RevenueCat subscription management platform, Which raised $50 million Series C Last year, and Free applicationa startup that helps with mobile gaming It improves Their own monetization, which was announced by A $58 million Series B Back in August. This week, Liftoff Mobile, which helps market and monetize apps, launched. Submitted for public subscription.

As revenues rose, downloads fell again in 2025.

After reaching an all-time high of 135 billion in 2020 during the pandemic, downloads have been on the decline. This year’s figure of 106.9 billion installs is down from 109.8 billion in 2024, and comes after download growth slowed between 2023 and 2024, when installs fell by 3.3%.

Mobile game downloads have seen an even bigger decline this year. In 2025, mobile games were downloaded 39.4 billion times, down 8.6% year-over-year, after a 6.6% decline from 2023 to 2024. Non-game app downloads were essentially flat, seeing only a slight increase of 1.1% year-over-year, to 67.4 billion.

The full report also takes a look at the US market specifically. Here, consumers spent an estimated $55.5 billion across all mobile apps, up 18.1% year over year from $47 billion in 2024. Downloads reached 10 billion, down 4.2% from 10.4 billion in 2024. US consumers spent $33.6 billion on non-gaming apps, up 26.8% year over year, and $21.9 billion on games, up just 6.8%.

Non-gaming app downloads in the United States were estimated at 7.1 billion times in 2025, while games were downloaded 2.9 billion times.