Sensor Tower: In the second quarter of 2025, apps surpassed mobile games in IAP revenue for the first time

While the mobile gaming market stagnates, the market for non-gaming apps is growing. This is reported by analysts at Sensor Tower, who studied the situation in Google Play and the App Store from April to June 2025.

• According to analysts’ estimates, games and apps collectively earned $40.9 billion from IAP over three months—this is the best quarterly result in Sensor Tower’s history of observations.
• For the first time, more than half of the amount went to apps. Their IAP revenue reached $21.1 billion, increasing by 24.1% compared to last year. This happened largely due to the audience’s interest in ChatGPT and other AI software.
• The IAP revenue of games grew by only 0.7% to $19.8 billion.

• Overall quarterly downloads of games and apps remained unchanged—just like a year ago, they totaled 36.6 billion. If we look at games separately, their downloads fell by 6.8% to 12.8 billion.

• The most profitable genre among games in the second quarter was strategy with $4.75 billion (+23%). Following were RPGs with $3.62 billion (-12%) and puzzles with $3.48 billion (+13%).

• In terms of downloads, the top three game genres for the quarter were simulators (2.58 billion, -6%), arcade games (2.52 billion, -3%), and puzzles (2.52 billion, -1%).

• Last War: Survival once again topped the mobile games in terms of quarterly IAP revenue. Note that the current top-grossing list is generally not much different from the results of January-March 2025.
• There are also few changes in the most downloaded games. The only notable change is that Block Blast (↑2) climbed to first place, and Delta Force (↑693) reached seventh place.

• Separately, Sensor Tower compiled lists of so-called “breakout” mobile games. These are games whose IAP revenue and downloads have increased the most compared to the beginning of the year. In this case, the revenue top was led by SD Gundam G Generation ETERNAL, while the download top was led by the previously mentioned Delta Force.