App downloads declined again in 2025, but consumer spending soared to nearly $156B

The subscription economy helped boost mobile app revenues in 2025, even as app downloads declined for the fifth consecutive year, according to app intelligence firm Appfigures‘ annual report. In 2025, global downloads of all mobile apps and mobile games via the App Store and Google Play reached an estimated 106.9 billion, 2.7% lower than the year prior. Consumer spending, meanwhile, climbed 21.6% to reach an estimated $155.8 billion during the same period.

The data indicates 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 been falling.

The report also reflected the continued shift away from mobile games as the primary revenue driver for the app economy. In 2025, consumers spent $72.2 billion on mobile games, accounting for about 46% of all spending within mobile apps. While that figure is up 10% year-over-year, spending on non-game mobile apps also increased. In fact, non-game app spending is up 33.9% year-over-year and reached $82.6 billion in 2025, Appfigures said.

While consumers may not like that nearly every app now has in-app purchases or a subscription model built in, this has offered a more sustainable path for app developers. Plus, the shift toward ongoing payments for apps has helped fuel an ecosystem of businesses serving the mobile app ecosystem. This includes subscription management platform RevenueCat, which raised a $50 million Series C this past year, and Appcharge, a startup helping mobile games improve their monetization, which announced a $58 million Series B back in August. This week, Liftoff Mobile, which helps market and monetize apps, filed for an IPO.

As revenue rose, downloads dropped 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 was down from 109.8 billion in 2024, and follows slowed download growth between 2023 and 2024, when installs were down 3.3%.

Mobile game downloads saw a larger 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 — they only saw a slight increase of 1.1% year-over-year, reaching 67.4 billion.

The full report also takes a look at the U.S. 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 the 10.4 billion in 2024. U.S. consumers spent $33.6 billion on non-game apps, up 26.8% year-over-year, and spent $21.9 billion on games, up just 6.8%.

U.S. non-game app downloads were an estimated 7.1 billion in 2025, while games were downloaded 2.9 billion times.