Apple’s App Store generated $52.5 billion from mobile games in 2025 – more than Google Play and Steam combined – according to Sensor Tower’s State of Gaming 2026 report. Google Play brought in $30 billion and Steam added $11.7 billion, putting the pair’s combined total at $41.7 billion, still short of the App Store’s haul. Apple’s platform did it while carrying just 15% of gaming installs, versus Google Play’s 81% share, underscoring a revenue-per-install gap between iOS and Android that has held for more than a decade.
The split matters more in 2026 than it has in years, because the platforms it sits inside are moving in opposite directions. Mobile game revenue grew just 1.3% in 2025, to roughly $81.75 billion, the slowest of three straight growth years. PC and console gaming revenue, by contrast, jumped 13%, powered by Battlefield 6, breakout indie hits R.E.P.O. and PEAK, and a wave of AA titles. Half-year 2026 numbers published since suggest the mobile slowdown is not a blip: in-app purchase revenue fell another 2% between January and June. Here is what the App Store vs. Google Play data shows, why the gap persists, and what it signals for publishers and platform holders through the rest of 2026.
What Sensor Tower’s State of Gaming 2026 Report Found
Sensor Tower publishes State of Gaming as an annual look back at how mobile, PC, and console platforms performed over the prior calendar year, drawing on its own app-tracking and store-intelligence data. The 2026 edition, covering full-year 2025, put total gaming revenue across all platforms at $94 billion on 52 billion combined downloads, according to Sensor Tower’s official summary of the report.
Mobile still accounts for the overwhelming majority of that download volume – Google Play alone delivered 42 billion of the 52 billion downloads, more than four times the App Store’s volume – but PC and console downloads carry disproportionate revenue weight because they lean on premium, up-front purchases rather than mobile’s free-to-play, ad- and IAP-driven model. Sensor Tower’s release credits 2025’s console/PC strength to a mix of viral indie hits, strong AA output, and dependable AAA pipelines anchored by Battlefield 6, the year’s top-selling title, with CEO and co-founder Oliver Yeh cited crediting that combination directly.
For app store owners specifically, the report’s headline finding is a widening efficiency gap rather than a growth story: install volume on Google Play grew, title counts on both stores grew, but revenue per install on the App Store continued to outpace Google Play by a wide margin. That gap is the through-line for the rest of this report, from platform take-rate arguments to publisher platform strategy for the year ahead.
App Store vs. Google Play: The 2025 Numbers Compared
Stripped of framing, the App Store vs. Google Play comparison for 2025 breaks down cleanly by platform. Apple grew game revenue only 0.6% year-over-year, to $52.5 billion, while Google Play grew faster in percentage terms – up 2.8%, to $30 billion – without closing the absolute gap. Steam, included here for scale, posted the fastest growth of the three major storefronts at 13%, reaching $11.7 billion in game revenue, though it remains well behind either mobile platform in total dollars, according to figures reported by 9to5Mac and 80.lv.
The install-share numbers are the more striking half of the picture. Google Play’s catalog is more than twice the size of the App Store’s – over 150,000 games versus 55,300 – and grew far faster year-over-year. Yet none of that catalog growth translated into closing the revenue gap with Apple’s smaller, slower-growing store.
| Platform | 2025 Game Revenue | YoY Growth | Share of Gaming Installs | Game Titles Available | Title Count YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple App Store | $52.5 billion | +0.6% | 15% | 55,300 | +11.4% |
| Google Play | $30.0 billion | +2.8% | 81% | 150,000+ | +45.9% |
| Steam (for scale) | $11.7 billion | +13.0% | 4%* | – | – |
Why iPhone Users Outspend Android Users
The App Store’s revenue-per-install advantage is not a 2025 anomaly; it is one of the more durable patterns in mobile economics. iOS users have out-spent Android users on games for years, a gap most industry analysts trace to a handful of structural factors rather than any single product decision.
First, Apple’s platform skews toward wealthier markets. The App Store’s install base is concentrated in the US, Western Europe, and Japan – regions with higher disposable income and, historically, more willingness to pay for in-app purchases and subscriptions. Google Play, by contrast, dominates install volume in price-sensitive, high-population markets across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where ad-supported and lower-ARPU free-to-play models are more common.
Second, Apple’s historically tighter distribution model – no sideloading in most markets, a single App Store, and a review process credited with filtering out low-quality or scam apps more aggressively than Android’s more open ecosystem – has long been linked to higher user trust in in-app payments, though the European Union’s Digital Markets Act has forced Apple to allow alternative app stores and sideloading for EU users since 2024. Third, hardware pricing plays a role: iPhone owners skew toward higher household incomes than the median Android owner, a demographic difference that shows up directly in average revenue per paying user.
None of these dynamics are new. What is new in the 2025 data is that Google Play’s catalog and install growth accelerated sharply – nearly 46% more titles year-over-year – without meaningfully denting Apple’s revenue lead, suggesting the ARPU gap is proving more durable than the volume gap.
Google Play’s Volume Advantage: 42 Billion Downloads
Where Apple wins on revenue, Google wins decisively on reach. Google Play delivered 42 billion game downloads in 2025 alone – more than four out of every five game downloads tracked across mobile, PC, and console combined. That scale is a direct product of Android’s global device footprint, which vastly outnumbers iOS in unit terms across most of the world outside North America, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia.
The gap between download share and revenue share is the clearest way to see the two platforms’ different roles in the gaming economy. Google Play functions as the volume engine – the place where free-to-play titles chase scale, ad impressions, and a broad top-of-funnel audience. The App Store functions as the monetization engine, converting a smaller, higher-intent audience into disproportionate in-app spending. Publishers building global live-service titles increasingly design monetization strategy around that split: broad, ad-supported acquisition on Android paired with deeper IAP and subscription funnels on iOS.
Mobile Growth Stalls as PC and Console Surge 13%
Set against the App Store vs. Google Play split, the bigger platform story in Sensor Tower’s data is where growth is actually happening. Mobile game revenue rose just 1.3% in 2025 to roughly $81.75 billion – the slowest of three consecutive growth years – while PC and console gaming revenue climbed 13%, alongside download growth of 7% and release growth of 8.4%.
Two publisher tiers drove that PC/console acceleration: AA studios grew revenue 29% year-over-year, and AAA publishers grew 25%, both comfortably outpacing mobile’s flat trajectory. Within consoles specifically, Sensor Tower found Steam generated 37% more downloads than PlayStation, while PlayStation and Xbox combined delivered 1.17 billion downloads – enough to surpass PC on its own. Shattered.io covered Steam’s own record-setting first half separately in our Steam revenue report.
For an industry that spent much of the past decade treating mobile as its primary growth engine, a year in which console and PC out-grew mobile by roughly 10 percentage points is a meaningful inflection point, even if mobile still generates several times as much revenue in absolute terms.
| Metric (2025, YoY) | Mobile (App Store + Google Play) | PC / Console Combined |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue growth | +1.3% | +13.0% |
| Release / title growth | +11.4% (App Store) / +45.9% (Google Play) | +8.4% |
| Download growth | Google Play alone: 42B total downloads | +7.0% |
| Standout growth segment | Strategy genre (only category gaining revenue, downloads, and time spent) | AA publishers +29%, AAA publishers +25% |
Battlefield 6, R.E.P.O., and PEAK Power a Record Year
Three titles anchor Sensor Tower’s account of PC and console’s 2025: Battlefield 6 as the year’s top-selling game overall, followed by breakout co-op hits R.E.P.O. and PEAK rounding out the top three. The mix is notable less for Battlefield 6‘s presence – a traditional AAA shooter topping year-end charts is not new – than for indie titles R.E.P.O. and PEAK holding the No. 2 and No. 3 spots ahead of most of the industry’s AAA slate.
Both titles are cooperative, session-based games that built their audiences largely through streaming and word-of-mouth rather than traditional marketing spend, a distribution pattern that has become increasingly common on Steam, where wishlist-driven discovery and creator content can turn a small studio’s release into a chart-topping hit within weeks. On the mobile side, the top two games by revenue for 2025 were Last War: Survival and Whiteout Survival – both Strategy titles, the only mobile genre that gained across revenue, downloads, and time spent for the year.
| Rank / Role | Full-Year 2025 | H1 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| No. 1 mobile game (revenue) | Last War: Survival | Honor of Kings (~$1.1B, reclaimed top spot) |
| No. 2 mobile game (revenue) | Whiteout Survival | – |
| No. 1 PC/console game | Battlefield 6 | – |
| No. 2 PC/console game | R.E.P.O. | – |
| No. 3 PC/console game | PEAK | – |
| Fastest-climbing mobile publisher | – | Century Games (No. 4 to No. 2, IAP +45%) |
H1 2026 Data: The Gap Is Not Closing
Data covering the first half of 2026, published separately from the full-year State of Gaming report, suggests the mobile slowdown documented in 2025 has continued rather than reversed. Mobile game in-app purchase revenue totaled roughly $40 billion in H1 2026, down 2% year-over-year, while downloads held closer to stable at around 24 billion, according to trade press coverage of Sensor Tower’s H1 2026 gaming market index.
Advertising told a different story: mobile game ad spend rose 7% year-over-year to roughly $7 billion in the same period, meaning publishers spent more to acquire players even as those players’ collective in-app spending shrank – a combination that squeezes margins on the acquisition side of the business.
At the individual-publisher level, Honor of Kings reclaimed the top worldwide mobile IAP spot in H1 2026 with roughly $1.1 billion in revenue, even as its own revenue dipped about 2% year-over-year, illustrating how competitive the category has become at the very top. Century Games climbed from fourth to second among mobile publishers by IAP revenue, growing 45%, narrowing Tencent’s lead at the top of the publisher rankings.
The H1 2026 data does not directly update the App Store vs. Google Play revenue split from the full-year 2025 report, but the direction is consistent: a flat-to-shrinking mobile spending pool makes Apple’s revenue-per-install advantage more valuable, not less, to any publisher deciding where to prioritize monetization investment.
Strategy Genre Cools as Puzzle Games Gain Ground
Genre-level data adds a second axis to the mobile slowdown. Strategy was the only major mobile genre to gain across revenue, downloads, and time spent in full-year 2025. But H1 2026 genre data shows that lead narrowing: strategy generated $9.3 billion in the first half of the year, down roughly 5% year-over-year, while puzzle games grew in-app purchase revenue by nearly 20%, to $8.1 billion, closing most of the gap between the two categories in a single half-year.
If both trend lines hold for the rest of 2026, puzzle could overtake strategy as mobile’s leading IAP genre by revenue before year-end – a shift that would mark the first change at the top of mobile’s genre rankings in several years and would likely redirect a meaningful share of mobile user-acquisition and ad spend toward puzzle publishers. It would also reinforce the broader pattern in the App Store vs. Google Play data: mobile growth in 2026 is increasingly about which pocket of the market is shrinking slower, not which is expanding fastest.
Market Impact: What It Means for Publishers and Investors
The practical impact of a flat mobile market and a widening App Store efficiency gap falls hardest on publisher strategy and platform investment decisions. Live-service mobile studios face a market where user-acquisition costs are rising – ad spend up 7% in H1 2026 – while the pool of in-app spending they are competing for is shrinking, a margin squeeze that tends to accelerate consolidation among mid-tier publishers unable to match top studios’ marketing budgets.
That dynamic is visible in the publisher rankings themselves: Century Games’ 45% IAP growth and jump to the No. 2 mobile publisher spot came largely at the expense of smaller competitors, not category leader Tencent, whose lead narrowed but did not disappear. Expect more of that pattern – consolidation among the next tier of publishers, rather than a change at the very top – through the rest of 2026.
For platform holders, the App Store’s revenue-per-install advantage strengthens Apple’s negotiating position with publishers even as regulators chip away at its take-rate control in specific markets. Google Play’s response has been to compete on catalog breadth and install volume – visible in its 45.9% year-over-year title growth – rather than trying to match Apple’s ARPU directly, a strategy that keeps its platform relevant for reach-driven campaigns even without closing the revenue gap.
For PC and console, the 13% revenue jump and AA/AAA publisher growth of 29% and 25% respectively point toward continued investment in premium, up-front-priced titles and toward platforms that reward viral, community-driven discovery – a structurally different growth story from mobile’s ad-and-IAP model, and one that is likely to keep drawing publisher investment away from mobile-first strategies in 2026 if the growth gap persists. Shattered.io’s coverage of US game spending trends tracks the consumer side of that same shift.
Historical Context: A Decade-Long App Store Premium
The App Store’s revenue edge over Google Play is not a new phenomenon; it has shown up in industry data every year since smartphone gaming became a mass-market business in the early 2010s. What has changed over that period is the regulatory environment around it. Epic Games’ 2020 lawsuit against Apple over App Store fees – and a parallel case against Google – put the platforms’ standard commission structure under sustained legal and public scrutiny for the first time. Both companies subsequently introduced reduced-rate programs for smaller developers, and the European Union’s Digital Markets Act began forcing Apple to permit alternative app stores, sideloading, and alternative payment systems for EU users starting in 2024.
None of that regulatory pressure has closed the App Store vs. Google Play revenue gap documented in the 2025 data – if anything, Apple’s per-install monetization edge widened in relative terms as Google Play’s catalog grew far faster than its revenue. That suggests the gap is driven more by user demographics and willingness to pay than by platform fee structures alone, since fee changes have applied to both stores without narrowing the difference between them.
Competitive Comparison: App Store, Google Play, and PC Platforms
Viewed side by side, the App Store, Google Play, and PC/console storefronts now represent three distinct business models operating inside the same $94 billion global gaming economy. The App Store is the highest-ARPU, lowest-volume platform of the three, built on a smaller, wealthier, more monetization-friendly user base. Google Play is the volume leader, with the largest catalog and by far the most downloads, but the lowest revenue per install. PC and console platforms sit apart from both mobile stores structurally: they rely on premium pricing rather than free-to-play monetization, which is why a small share of total gaming installs can still translate into a 13% revenue growth rate and $11.7 billion in Steam revenue alone – a dynamic shattered.io has also tracked in PC vs. console spending data.
For publishers, that three-way split increasingly shapes where a given title gets built first. Live-service, free-to-play-native titles still default to mobile-first launches to exploit Google Play’s reach and the App Store’s monetization strength together. But 2025’s data – AA and AAA publisher growth of 29% and 25% on PC/console, against 1.3% mobile growth – is a real argument for premium, PC/console-first releases for mid-budget titles that might have defaulted to mobile a few years earlier.
5 Predictions for App Store vs. Google Play Through 2026
Based on the trajectory in Sensor Tower’s full-year 2025 and H1 2026 data, here are five likely developments for App Store vs. Google Play competition and the broader platform landscape through the rest of 2026:
- The App Store’s revenue lead holds, even as its growth rate stays near flat. Nothing in the 2025 or H1 2026 data suggests Google Play is closing the ARPU gap; expect Apple’s dollar lead over Google Play to persist through year-end even if both platforms grow in the low single digits.
- Puzzle overtakes strategy as mobile’s top-grossing genre. If H1 2026’s trend lines continue – puzzle IAP up nearly 20%, strategy down about 5% – puzzle could take the genre revenue lead by late 2026, the first such shift in years.
- PC and console keep outgrowing mobile for the rest of 2026. With mobile IAP already down 2% in H1 2026 against a record 2025 for PC/console, expect publishers to keep shifting mid-budget development toward premium PC/console releases.
- Mid-tier mobile publisher consolidation accelerates. Rising user-acquisition costs against flat-to-shrinking IAP revenue squeeze publishers without Century Games- or Tencent-scale budgets, likely producing more acquisitions or shutdowns among mid-tier mobile studios before year-end.
- Regulatory pressure on App Store fees continues without closing the revenue gap. Further enforcement of the EU’s Digital Markets Act and related cases will likely keep chipping at Apple’s take rate in specific markets, but based on the pattern since 2024, that pressure alone is unlikely to narrow the App Store’s per-install revenue advantage over Google Play.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the App Store make more money than Google Play?
Yes. Apple’s App Store generated $52.5 billion from mobile games in 2025, compared with $30 billion for Google Play, according to Sensor Tower’s State of Gaming 2026 report – a gap of roughly 75% even though Google Play had more than four times as many downloads.
Why does the App Store earn more than Google Play despite fewer downloads?
Analysts generally point to demographics and platform structure: the App Store’s install base skews toward higher-income markets in North America, Western Europe, and Japan, while Google Play dominates volume in more price-sensitive, high-population markets. A historically more closed distribution model has also been linked to higher user trust in iOS in-app payments.
How much mobile game revenue did Apple and Google make in 2025 combined?
Together, the App Store and Google Play generated roughly $82.5 billion from mobile games in 2025, part of the $81.75 billion in total mobile game IAP revenue Sensor Tower reported industry-wide for the year.
Is mobile game revenue growing in 2026?
Growth has slowed. Mobile game revenue rose just 1.3% in full-year 2025, and H1 2026 data shows in-app purchase revenue down 2% year-over-year, suggesting the slowdown documented in the annual report has continued into 2026.
What was the best-selling game on PC and console in 2025?
Battlefield 6 was 2025’s top-selling PC/console title, according to Sensor Tower, followed by indie co-op hits R.E.P.O. and PEAK in the No. 2 and No. 3 spots.
Why is PC and console gaming growing faster than mobile?
PC and console revenue grew 13% in 2025, versus 1.3% for mobile, driven largely by AA and AAA publisher growth of 29% and 25% respectively. Analysts attribute the gap to premium, up-front pricing on PC/console versus mobile’s saturated free-to-play and ad-driven model.
Will Google Play ever catch up to the App Store in game revenue?
Nothing in the 2025 or H1 2026 data points that direction. Google Play’s game catalog grew 45.9% year-over-year – far faster than the App Store’s 11.4% – without narrowing the revenue gap, suggesting the App Store’s per-install monetization advantage is structural rather than catalog-driven.
What is Sensor Tower’s State of Gaming 2026 report?
It is Sensor Tower’s annual analysis of mobile, PC, and console gaming performance, covering full-year 2025 data on downloads, revenue, publisher growth, and top titles across the App Store, Google Play, Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox.
Related Coverage
More shattered.io coverage of gaming platform economics and storefronts, part of our ongoing gaming reporting:
- Steam vs Epic Games Store: 30% vs 12% Cut [2026]
- GOG vs Steam: 30-Day Refunds vs 2-Hour Limit [2026]
- Steam Posts Record $11.1B, Old Games Drive 79% [2026]
- PC Gaming vs Console Gaming: $11.1B vs -19% Drop [2026]
- US Game Spending Falls 21% as Switch 2 Laps Launch [2026]
- Roblox Age Verification Wipes $6.7B, Stock -18% [2026]
