Which app categories make the most money now?

What does “make the most money” actually mean for an app category?

The app categories making the most money today change completely depending on whether we count in-app purchases, advertising, subscriptions or transactions that happen outside the app stores.

If we look only at App Store and Google Play consumer spending, games remain the biggest individual category. Once advertising enters the calculation, social media becomes much larger than store-revenue rankings suggest. And if we care about how much a subscription app earns from each new install, health & fitness and business apps beat most entertainment categories.

The measurement problem is especially important for shopping, finance, delivery and travel. Sensor Tower’s consumer-spending estimates cover paid downloads, subscriptions and in-app purchases, but generally leave out things such as Amazon orders, Uber rides, DoorDash deliveries and investment transactions.

So someone can spend $1,000 through a shopping app without adding $1,000 to the mobile-app revenue figures we normally see.

That leaves us with several different winners. Games have the largest pool of direct mobile consumer spending. Social apps become enormous once advertising is included. Health & fitness and business look particularly strong when we focus on subscription revenue per acquired user.

What we measure	Categories that look strongest	What the number captures
App-store consumer spending	Games, social, streaming, AI	Subscriptions, IAP and paid downloads
Advertising revenue	Social, video, games	Monetized attention
Subscription revenue per install	Health & fitness, business, education	Ability to turn downloads into recurring revenue
Transactions outside app stores	Shopping, finance, delivery, travel	Economic activity largely missing from app-store rankings

Have non-game apps actually overtaken mobile games?

Yes. Non-game apps now generate more App Store and Google Play consumer spending than mobile games, and the latest quarterly numbers show the lead getting wider.

According to Sensor Tower, worldwide consumer spending across the two major app stores reached roughly $167 billion in 2025. Games accounted for about $82 billion, leaving approximately $85 billion for non-game apps. It was the first full year in which non-games came out ahead.

That is a large change from only a few years earlier. In 2020, consumers were still spending roughly 2.5 times as much on mobile games as they were on non-game apps.

The latest quarter makes the shift harder to dismiss as a temporary crossover. Sensor Tower measured $43.6 billion of global in-app spending in Q2 2026. Non-games reached a record $24.4 billion, up 14.6% year over year, while gaming revenue fell 4.5%.

That puts non-games at about 56% of store spending for the quarter.

One caveat: “non-game apps” combines social media, streaming, AI, dating, productivity, health and many smaller categories. No single one of those categories has overtaken gaming by itself.

Are games still the biggest individual app category?

Yes. Mobile games are still comfortably the biggest individual category for direct App Store and Google Play spending today.

Games generated roughly $82 billion of consumer spending in 2025. Even during the softer Q2 2026 period, gaming still produced about $19.2 billion in a single quarter.

The largest non-game categories remain much smaller individually. Social-media apps generated $12.9 billion across the whole of 2025, while movie and television streaming produced roughly $11.6 billion. Generative-AI apps exceeded $5 billion.

So gaming still operates at a very different scale. Its annual store revenue is roughly six times social media’s direct in-app spending and around seven times streaming’s.

What has weakened is growth. Gaming revenue increased only around 1% in 2025, and Sensor Tower then recorded a 4.5% year-over-year decline in Q2 2026. Downloads are also under pressure as the industry shifts away from chasing massive install volumes and toward extracting more money from existing players.

Games therefore still have the biggest revenue pool. The category just looks much more mature these days than AI, social subscriptions or several fast-growing non-game niches.

Which non-game app categories make the most money now?

Social media and video streaming are currently the two biggest established non-game categories for direct app-store spending, while generative AI is catching up faster than anything else.

Sensor Tower estimated $12.9 billion of social-media in-app spending in 2025, up 17%. Movie and television streaming generated roughly $11.6 billion. Dating remained another multi-billion-dollar category, although growth among its biggest apps has become much less consistent.

Then there is AI. Generative-AI apps moved from roughly $1.1 billion of consumer spending in 2024 to more than $5 billion in 2025. During Q2 2026 alone, generative-AI spending doubled year over year.

That speed is what separates AI from the other categories. Social media, streaming and dating spent years building their current revenue pools. Consumer AI went from a relatively small mobile business to several billion dollars of annual spending almost immediately.

Streaming is still much bigger than many fashionable app categories. YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, Spotify and other subscription services also earn substantial revenue outside mobile in-app purchases, so store estimates capture only part of the business.

For now, social and streaming remain the largest mature non-game categories. AI is the category most likely to disrupt that ranking next.

Category	Recent direct mobile spending	Current direction
Social media	$12.9B in 2025	Still growing
Movie & TV streaming	About $11.6B in 2025	Large but mature
Generative AI	More than $5B in 2025	Growing extremely fast
Dating	Multi-billion-dollar category	Mature and uneven

Does social media make more money than games once advertising is included?

Probably yes. Once advertising is counted, social media has a much stronger claim than gaming to being the largest consumer-app business category.

The $12.9 billion spent directly inside social apps in 2025 tells only a small part of the story because Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and similar products mostly monetize attention through ads.

Meta makes the scale clear. Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp generated $198.8 billion of Family of Apps revenue in 2025, including $196.2 billion from advertising. We cannot call all of that “mobile-app revenue” because people also access Meta products through browsers and other surfaces, but mobile usage sits at the center of the business.

YouTube gives us another useful benchmark. Alphabet reported more than $60 billion of YouTube revenue across advertising and subscriptions in 2025, including $40.4 billion from advertising.

Compare those figures with roughly $82 billion of total mobile-game in-app spending across thousands of games worldwide.

Social apps also have extraordinary amounts of attention available to monetize. Sensor Tower measured close to 2.5 trillion hours spent in social-media apps during 2025, equivalent to more than 90 minutes per day for the average mobile user.

So games remain ahead when we count money consumers hand directly to apps through the stores. Once we broaden the question to all revenue generated around app usage, social media likely sits at the top.

Is generative AI already one of the biggest app categories?

Yes. Generative AI is already a multi-billion-dollar mobile category, and right now no other large app category is growing at a comparable rate.

Sensor Tower estimated roughly $1.1 billion of generative-AI app spending in 2024. That figure jumped past $5 billion in 2025. Then in Q2 2026, generative-AI mobile spending increased another 108% year over year.

ChatGPT alone reached about $1.4 billion of quarterly mobile revenue in Q2 2026, up 82% from the previous year. Anthropic’s Claude increased mobile revenue roughly fourfold from the previous quarter and entered Sensor Tower’s global top ten for non-game apps.

The market is also getting less concentrated. ChatGPT remains the dominant AI assistant, but Gemini, Claude and Grok are expanding quickly enough that consumer AI can no longer be described as one successful app surrounded by experiments.

Usage supports the revenue story. Sensor Tower measured around 48 billion hours spent in generative-AI apps during 2025, about 3.6 times the previous year, with sessions exceeding one trillion.

AI still sits below social media and streaming in annual category spending. At the pace we are seeing now, however, the gap can close much faster than historical app-category rankings would suggest.

Do AI apps make as much profit as their revenue suggests?

No. Generative-AI apps are producing spectacular revenue growth, but their economics are tougher than the top-line numbers make them look.

A conventional subscription app can usually serve another subscriber at almost zero marginal software cost. AI apps keep paying inference costs as customers generate text, code, images, audio or video. A heavy user can therefore cost meaningfully more to serve than a light user paying exactly the same subscription price.

RevenueCat’s 2026 subscription data makes the trade-off unusually visible. AI-powered subscription apps generate 41% more revenue per payer than non-AI apps, but they also churn 30% faster.

So AI appears to be excellent at convincing people to pay and less impressive at keeping them.

Competition adds another problem. ChatGPT leads the market, while Gemini, Claude and Grok are backed by companies with enormous compute budgets and strong reasons to subsidize growth. An independent AI app has to compete with those products while often paying one of the same companies for its underlying models.

There are still excellent AI businesses. The strongest ones usually add enough proprietary workflow, data, distribution or specialized functionality that customers are paying for more than raw model access.

For anyone comparing app categories, the key point is simple: $1 of AI subscription revenue can be more expensive to produce and harder to retain than $1 from a conventional health, business or productivity app.

Which subscription app categories make the most money per install?

Health & fitness and business apps currently have the strongest subscription revenue per install among the major categories in RevenueCat’s data.

RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps 2026 covers more than 115,000 subscription apps representing over $16 billion of tracked revenue. After 60 days, the median health & fitness app had generated $0.66 for every install. Business apps reached $0.50.

Gaming subscription apps produced only $0.14 per install over the same period. That comparison does not capture the enormous amount games make from consumable purchases and advertising, but it tells us a lot about the economics of trying to build a recurring-revenue app.

The pattern continues once somebody has started paying. Health & fitness generated median realized revenue per payer of $35.64 after one year, with business almost identical at $35.48. Productivity reached $24.95 and education $22.82. Gaming came in at $11.22.

Conversion helps explain the difference. By day 35, the median health & fitness app had turned 2.9% of downloads into paying customers. Business reached 2.6%, compared with 1% for gaming.

Education also monetizes reasonably well and can charge high annual prices, but many education use cases naturally end when someone passes an exam, finishes a course or loses interest. Health and business products often solve problems that continue indefinitely.

Geography can move these economics dramatically. RevenueCat found median 60-day revenue per install of $0.55 in North America and only $0.11 across India and Southeast Asia. The same category can therefore produce very different businesses depending on where its users come from.

Category	Median revenue per install after 60 days	Median revenue per payer after 1 year
Health & fitness	$0.66	$35.64
Business	$0.50	$35.48
Productivity	Below the two leaders	$24.95
Education	Around $0.40	$22.82
Gaming subscriptions	$0.14	$11.22

Why do health & fitness apps make so much money per user?

Health & fitness apps monetize unusually well because people will keep paying for recurring outcomes such as losing weight, sleeping better, running faster or following a training plan.

RevenueCat’s latest benchmarks put health & fitness first on several different measures at once. The category generates $0.48 of median revenue per install after 14 days and $0.66 after 60 days. Its median download-to-paid conversion reaches 2.9%, and one-year realized revenue per payer is $35.64.

Trial conversion is strong too. Health & fitness apps convert a median 37.7% of trials into paid subscriptions, one of the highest rates RevenueCat recorded.

Products such as Strava, MyFitnessPal, Flo, Calm and AllTrails benefit from a useful characteristic: the customer’s underlying activity keeps happening. People continue exercising, running, tracking nutrition, monitoring cycles or trying to sleep better month after month.

Annual plans fit that behavior particularly well. RevenueCat found that health & fitness gets a large share of its subscription revenue from annual plans, which gives developers cash earlier and reduces the number of monthly cancellation opportunities.

The category still has plenty of churn, strong seasonality and brutal competition. Apple, Google and wearable-device makers also keep adding free health features.

Even with those drawbacks, health & fitness currently has one of the clearest combinations of pricing power, conversion and repeat use anywhere in consumer subscription apps.

Are business apps actually better businesses than entertainment apps?

For subscription developers, business apps currently have some of the best economics in the entire app market.

RevenueCat measures median business-app revenue per install at $0.31 after 14 days and $0.50 after 60 days. Only health & fitness is clearly ahead among the major categories.

Business apps also convert unusually well. The median business app turns 2.6% of downloads into paying customers by day 35, and business has the highest median download-to-trial rate at 9.1%.

The reason is fairly intuitive once we look at what customers are buying. A freelancer might pay $15 a month for an invoicing app that saves an hour of work. A small company can justify $50 a month for scheduling, document automation or lead management if the product saves labor or helps generate revenue.

Entertainment apps compete much more directly with free time. Their users can switch to YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Spotify or thousands of games.

Business software also has impressive upside among its best customers. RevenueCat found median one-year realized revenue per payer of $35.48, while top-performing business apps exceed $120.

There is a catch. A specialized business app usually has a much smaller addressable audience than a game or social product, and professional customers expect integrations, support and reliability.

Still, a developer does not need hundreds of millions of users when each customer is worth more. That is why narrow business apps can become surprisingly large with audiences that would look tiny by consumer-entertainment standards.

Which mobile game genres make the most money right now?

Strategy still makes the most money among mobile-game genres, but puzzle games are getting very close.

Sensor Tower measured $4.4 billion of strategy-game in-app spending in Q2 2026. Puzzle games exceeded $4 billion during the same quarter after growing 17% year over year.

That gap is now narrow enough to matter. Strategy has spent years near the top because games in the genre are exceptionally good at monetizing committed players through long-running economies, alliances, events and expensive in-game progression.

Puzzle reaches a broader audience and historically monetized less aggressively. Lately, the category has combined that reach with much better live operations and monetization.

Sensor Tower also found puzzle to be the only major mobile-game genre with positive year-over-year download growth during the quarter. Titles such as Arrows Puzzle Escape helped push the genre higher while simulation, arcade and several other categories recorded double-digit download declines.

So the interesting race inside gaming is no longer simply about which genre attracts the most installs. Strategy still has the revenue crown for now, while puzzle is the genre putting the most pressure on it.

Mobile-game genre	Current revenue position	Recent trend
Strategy	No. 1	$4.4B in Q2, but under pressure
Puzzle	Very close No. 2	Above $4B in Q2, +17% YoY
RPG	Still large	Weaker than its previous peak
Casino	High spending per payer	Mature
Casual / simulation	Huge audiences	Lower direct monetization

Is dating still one of the best app categories for making money?

Dating still makes billions of dollars, but right now it looks much more like a mature market than a category riding broad growth.

Match Group generated roughly $3.49 billion of revenue in 2025. Tinder remained its biggest product at about $1.86 billion of direct revenue, although Tinder revenue fell 4% and its number of payers declined 7%.

Hinge is moving the other way. Its direct revenue grew 26% in the fourth quarter, while international expansion continued to add users.

Bumble shows why we should avoid treating dating as one uniform market. Bumble App revenue fell from roughly $866 million to $783 million in 2025, while paying users declined 13.3%.

We therefore have three major dating products moving in different directions at the same time: Tinder remains huge but is shrinking, Hinge is growing quickly, and Bumble has been losing revenue and payers.

People clearly still spend serious money on dating. The category benefits from strong willingness to pay because users attach enormous value to finding a partner or simply getting more matches.

Its awkward feature is built into the product itself: successful customers can eventually leave because the app worked. Dating companies continually need new singles, returning users and better monetization of the people who remain.

Dating is still a very profitable app category for the winners. These days, though, picking the right product matters much more than simply being exposed to a growing category.

Why do finance, shopping and delivery apps look so small in app-revenue rankings?

Finance, shopping and delivery apps look artificially small because most of the money flowing through them never appears as App Store or Google Play consumer spending.

Sensor Tower excludes purchases such as Amazon orders, Lyft rides and DoorDash deliveries from its standard mobile consumer-spending estimates. Similar gaps appear in banking, insurance and investing.

Imagine two apps. One sells a $20 digital subscription through Apple. The other helps a user buy a $2,000 laptop. Conventional app-store revenue data can record the full $20 from the first transaction while recording essentially none of the $2,000 merchandise purchase.

Finance creates an even bigger mismatch. A brokerage app might generate revenue from spreads, interest, subscriptions, payment fees or assets under management. None of those necessarily appear as an in-app purchase.

This is why shopping and finance should not be compared directly with games using app-store spending alone. Their apps are interfaces for much larger transaction businesses.

The same distinction changes what makes a good app idea. A subscription utility can start charging immediately with little infrastructure. A marketplace, fintech or delivery app may eventually handle vastly more money, but it usually needs payments, liquidity, logistics, regulation, merchants or other expensive systems behind the screen.

Which app categories make the most money now?

Games still make the most direct consumer money as one mobile-app category, while social media likely makes the most overall once advertising is included. Generative AI is currently the fastest-growing large category, and health & fitness plus business apps have the strongest subscription economics for a typical developer.

That is the clearest answer we can reach from the current data.

Gaming remains enormous at roughly $82 billion of annual store spending, but growth has stalled and the latest quarterly revenue declined. Non-game apps have already overtaken games collectively.

Among established non-games, social and streaming have the biggest direct consumer-spending pools. Social becomes much larger again when we add advertising.

AI sits in a different position. Generative-AI mobile spending went from roughly $1.1 billion in 2024 to more than $5 billion in 2025, then grew another 108% year over year in Q2 2026. Nothing else at that scale is moving nearly as quickly right now.

For someone building a new subscription app, however, the category leaders by absolute dollars are often the wrong benchmarks. Social needs massive distribution. Games require expensive content, user acquisition and live operations. Streaming needs content. AI brings meaningful inference costs and unusually high churn.

As seen above, health & fitness and business apps convert downloads into subscribers much more efficiently and generate roughly three times gaming’s one-year subscription revenue per payer in RevenueCat’s dataset.

So the answer depends on what kind of “most money” we care about. Games lead direct app-store spending. Social media is probably the largest app-centered revenue machine once ads are counted. Generative AI is growing fastest today. And if the goal is to build a profitable subscription app without needing an audience of hundreds of millions, health & fitness and business software currently have the strongest numbers behind them.