Which Google Play app niches are making money now?

Is Google Play making more money now, or just getting more downloads?

Google Play is making more money now even though app downloads have barely moved, which is a much healthier setup for developers than download growth without spending growth.

Sensor Tower’s latest Digital Market Index puts worldwide mobile in-app purchase revenue at $43.6 billion in Q2 2026, up 5.3% from a year earlier while total downloads were basically flat. Google Play revenue grew about 10% year over year, versus roughly 3% on iOS.

The bigger change is happening outside gaming. Non-game apps generated a record $24.4 billion during the quarter, up 14.6%. Mobile games went the other way, with spending down 4.5%.

That gap has been building for years. In 2025, non-game apps overtook games in combined mobile consumer spending for the first time. Ten years earlier, games were bringing in almost six times as much money.

So Google Play today is a more interesting place for subscriptions, AI products, health apps, utilities and entertainment services than the old “Android equals games plus ads” picture suggests.

Mobile market metric	Latest reported quarter
Global mobile IAP revenue	$43.6B
IAP revenue growth	+5.3% YoY
Google Play revenue growth	+10% YoY
iOS revenue growth	+3% YoY
Non-game app revenue	$24.4B
Non-game revenue growth	+14.6% YoY
Mobile-game revenue growth	-4.5% YoY

Why is making money on Google Play still harder than on iPhone?

Google Play currently gives developers huge reach, but an Android install is still much less likely to turn into subscription revenue than an iPhone install.

RevenueCat’s 2026 study covers more than 115,000 subscription apps and over $16 billion in revenue. Its median app converted 0.9% of Google Play downloads into paying subscribers within 35 days, compared with 2.6% on the App Store. That is almost a threefold difference.

The interesting part comes once users actually begin a trial. Median trial-to-paid conversion is virtually identical: 32.5% on Google Play and about 32% on iOS.

Android’s biggest monetization problem appears earlier in the journey. Far fewer installers reach the point where they seriously consider paying.

Google Play also loses more existing subscribers to failed payments. RevenueCat found billing errors behind roughly 32% of Play Store subscription cancellations, versus about 15% on the App Store. A year earlier, the Android figure was around 28%, so this problem has actually become worse.

That changes how we should read revenue niches. A category with millions of Android downloads can still be mediocre if users arrive with little intention of paying. High-intent categories are much more interesting.

Are AI apps making the most money on Google Play right now?

Generative AI is currently the fastest-growing big app niche, with consumer spending still more than doubling despite ChatGPT already operating at enormous scale.

Sensor Tower says generative-AI mobile spending increased 108% year over year in Q2 2026. ChatGPT alone generated about $1.4 billion during the quarter, 82% more than a year earlier, and passed two billion cumulative mobile downloads.

The competition is also becoming more serious. Claude’s mobile revenue jumped roughly fourfold in a single quarter and pushed the app into the global top ten for non-game revenue. Across the latest full comparison, Claude, Gemini and Grok each grew mobile revenue at least sevenfold year over year.

This is a huge change from 2023. Sensor Tower estimates that generative-AI mobile apps were making less than $60 million per quarter at the beginning of that year. By Q1 2026, the category had reached roughly $1.9 billion. That is more than 30 times as much revenue in three years.

Still, the market is heavily concentrated. ChatGPT accounts for roughly 60% of generative-AI mobile revenue in Sensor Tower’s latest breakdown.

AI absolutely belongs at the top of the Google Play money conversation today. Building another general chatbot is a much less convincing opportunity. Most of the category’s money is already clustering around a few giant assistants.

Do AI features actually help smaller apps make more money?

AI features are currently helping subscription apps charge and convert more, although the same apps are having a harder time keeping subscribers.

RevenueCat found that AI-powered subscription apps generate $18.92 in median revenue per payer during the first month, compared with $13.59 for apps without AI. After one year, the figures are $30.16 and $21.37. That leaves AI apps with roughly 41% more revenue per payer.

Their early conversion is stronger too. Median trial-to-paid conversion reaches 8.5% for AI apps against 5.6% for non-AI products.

Retention tells a less flattering story. Only 6.1% of monthly AI subscriptions remain active after 12 months, against 9.5% for non-AI apps. Annual-plan retention is 21.1% versus 30.7%, and refund rates are slightly higher for AI products as well.

We can see why when we look at where AI works best. RevenueCat found AI in 61% of Photo & Video subscription apps and 41% of Productivity apps, far more than most categories. In these products, AI does something visible: remove a background, edit a video, write copy, recognize food or automate a task.

That is a stronger proposition than simply adding a chatbot tab. AI is making money today when it removes work from an existing workflow. The harder question is whether users still need that workflow six or twelve months later.

Subscription metric	AI apps	Non-AI apps
First-month revenue per payer	$18.92	$13.59
Year-one revenue per payer	$30.16	$21.37
Monthly-plan retention after 12 months	6.1%	9.5%
Annual-plan retention after 12 months	21.1%	30.7%
Median refund rate	4.2%	3.5%

Are health and fitness apps the best subscription niche on Google Play?

Health and fitness is currently one of the strongest Google Play niches because users are paying more even though the category is barely adding downloads.

Sensor Tower estimates that Health & Fitness apps generated a record $4.5 billion in in-app purchases during 2025, up 13%. Downloads reached 3.96 billion but increased only 0.8%.

That difference is unusually important. Revenue increased around sixteen times faster than installs, so the category’s recent growth is coming mainly from better monetization rather than a temporary flood of new users.

RevenueCat’s subscription data points in the same direction. Health & Fitness has the highest median download-to-paid rate of any category it tracks, at 2.9%. Median revenue per install reaches $0.48 after 14 days and $0.66 after 60 days, again the strongest result in its category comparison. Median first-month revenue per payer is $24.23.

There are also several different businesses underneath the broad “fitness” label. Running products such as Strava and Runna sell training and tracking. Nutrition apps such as YAZIO, MacroFactor and Cal AI sell meal logging and diet guidance. Strength-training apps sell programming. Women’s-health products sell tracking and coaching around specific needs.

AI is improving some of these products in practical ways. Photographing a meal and getting an estimated calorie breakdown removes one of the most tedious parts of nutrition tracking. Personalized workout generation does the same for training plans.

That combination gives health apps something many categories lack: frequent use, measurable progress and a reason to pay for months rather than days.

Are photo and video apps still making money now that AI can generate everything?

Photo and video apps are still making serious money, and AI has so far expanded the creator-tool market rather than wiping it out.

Sensor Tower measured CapCut at roughly $4.8 million of weekly US mobile revenue near the end of 2025. Canva reached around $3.2 million a week. Those figures cover both major mobile stores, but Android contributes real revenue rather than serving only as an acquisition channel.

RevenueCat provides a useful broader benchmark. Photo & Video has the highest median monthly revenue one year after launch among the subscription categories it tracks: $124. More than 21% of newly launched Photo & Video apps reach $1,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years, the highest rate in its dataset.

AI has also become almost standard here. Roughly 61% of Photo & Video subscription apps now use AI as a core part of the product.

The category is getting harder at the generic end. Basic image generation, background removal and simple enhancement are becoming features inside Canva, CapCut, Google Photos and many other products.

The better openings these days are narrower creator workflows where users repeatedly need an output: product photos for sellers, social-video repurposing, thumbnails, real-estate images, subtitles, avatar content, restoration or tools built for a particular creator platform.

People will still pay to save twenty minutes on something they do several times a week. That is why creator utilities continue to monetize even as individual AI features become cheaper.

Are short-drama apps really making hundreds of millions of dollars?

Short-drama apps have become a real mobile business, with roughly $750 million of quarterly in-app revenue and growth still running well above the wider entertainment market.

Sensor Tower counted more than 850 million short-drama downloads worldwide in Q1 2026, 140% more than a year earlier. Quarterly in-app revenue reached roughly $750 million, up 20%.

DramaBox and ReelShort were each approaching $140 million in quarterly consumer spending. The category has moved a long way from the experimental vertical-video shows that appeared a few years ago.

Usage is also becoming serious. By spring 2026, Sensor Tower measured worldwide short-drama consumption at roughly 25 minutes per day, up about 85% from early 2025. Traditional streaming apps were around 35 minutes.

Android-heavy markets are driving a lot of the audience growth. Southeast Asia accounted for 32% of global short-drama downloads in Q1 2026, Latin America for 23% and India for 22%. Together they represented more than three quarters of all installs.

India gives us another fresh example. Short-drama downloads there have now passed 800 million cumulatively, and Story TV increased revenue by more than 50% quarter over quarter in Q2 2026 while becoming one of the country’s major entertainment apps.

There is plenty of money here, but this niche behaves more like a television studio attached to a mobile growth engine. Developers need a constant supply of stories, localization, advertising and user acquisition. It is a much heavier business than launching a subscription utility.

Do boring Google Play utilities still make real money?

Yes. VPNs, document tools and other practical utilities still make substantial Google Play revenue because users often arrive already knowing exactly what problem they need solved.

Sensor Tower measured NordVPN at roughly $272,000 to $453,000 in weekly US Android revenue during Q4 2025. Norton 360 peaked around $381,000 a week on Android during the same period.

Business apps show similar economics at a broader level. RevenueCat puts Business among the strongest subscription categories for conversion, with a 2.6% median download-to-paid rate. First-month revenue per payer is $18.76, behind Health & Fitness but well above gaming.

There is an interesting trade-off here. Business apps are slow to get going. RevenueCat’s median successful Business app takes about 113 days to reach $1,000 in monthly revenue, compared with only 32 days for Gaming.

Once customers pay, however, business software can keep them around because the app sits inside real work. Invoicing, document scanning, shift scheduling, secure connectivity, field reporting and profession-specific calculators are boring until somebody needs them every Tuesday.

Generic utilities are brutally crowded. A PDF scanner aimed at everyone has dozens of substitutes. A document workflow made specifically for landlords, nurses, contractors or small retailers has a clearer reason to get paid.

Are budgeting apps quietly making good money on Android?

Budgeting apps are making meaningful Android revenue, and the category is interesting because several independent products can earn at once rather than one platform taking nearly everything.

Sensor Tower’s US Android data from Q4 2025 puts Rocket Money at about $54,000 in weekly revenue at its peak. Monarch reached roughly $50,000, YNAB around $39,000 and EveryDollar as much as $56,000 earlier in the quarter.

These figures are smaller than Tinder or ChatGPT, but that is partly the point. We have four separate budgeting products generating tens of thousands of dollars every week on Android in one country.

Their value proposition is unusually easy to understand. If a $5 or $10 monthly app helps someone find an unwanted subscription, organize hundreds of transactions or stop overspending, the customer can directly compare the subscription cost with money saved.

Finance apps can also monetize outside Google Play through referrals and financial products, so store revenue understates the total economics of some businesses.

The crowded part is broad budgeting. A new app has a clearer opening around a specific user or financial problem: couples combining finances, freelancers with irregular income, debt repayment, cash-flow planning for small businesses or local banking systems that global apps handle badly.

Can education apps still charge subscriptions when ChatGPT answers questions for free?

Education apps can still make money today, but the strongest products sell a learning process rather than access to information.

RevenueCat puts Education among the better categories for subscription conversion and pricing. Median annual subscription pricing is roughly $45, and Education sits close to Health & Fitness and Business on early paid conversion.

The reason is simple when we look at what successful education products actually provide. A language app gives the user a sequence, exercises, feedback and repetition. A test-prep app organizes thousands of possible questions around an exam date. A children’s reading app gives parents a structured program and progress tracking.

Those things remain useful even when Gemini or ChatGPT can explain a grammar rule instantly.

Android revenue confirms that parents will pay for narrower products too. Sensor Tower measured Lingokids at roughly $34,000 in peak weekly US Android revenue during late 2025 and Reading.com near $29,000.

AI has made the weakest education concept even weaker: an app whose main feature is answering homework questions. Structured language learning, professional certification, exam preparation, children’s learning and other products with a clear destination are much harder to replace with an empty chat box.

Is dating still a great Google Play money niche?

Dating still generates enormous Google Play revenue, but entering the category today is much harder than the grossing charts make it look.

Tinder was generating roughly $1.5 million per week from US Android users alone during Q4 2025. Hinge finished the quarter around $915,000 a week, Bumble generally sat between $783,000 and $890,000, and Grindr peaked around $653,000.

Few non-game categories can show four Android apps at that level in one national market.

The difficulty comes from network effects. A dating app becomes useful when the right people are already using it nearby. Better swiping mechanics or prettier profiles do very little when the local pool is empty.

The established players are also no longer all moving upward. Across iOS and Android combined, Tinder’s weekly US revenue fell from roughly $9.2 million near the beginning of Q4 2025 to about $7.7 million near the end. Hinge and Bumble showed their own fluctuations.

There is still room for focused communities. The stronger route is usually a product organized around a particular relationship type, identity, geography or social context where existing platforms serve people badly.

Dating remains one of Android’s proven cash machines. We would be much more cautious about calling it an attractive niche for a new general-purpose app.

If we include games, which Google Play game niche is making money now?

Puzzle games are the clearest current winner in mobile gaming because revenue is growing quickly while the wider games market is shrinking.

Sensor Tower’s latest quarterly data show worldwide mobile-game revenue down 4.5% year over year. Puzzle revenue went in the opposite direction, rising 17% and passing $4 billion.

That brings Puzzle surprisingly close to Strategy, still the biggest mobile-game genre at roughly $4.4 billion.

Puzzle was also the only major gaming category with positive year-over-year download growth, at around 1%. Several arrow-puzzle games drove the recent jump. Arrows Puzzle Escape became the world’s most downloaded mobile game, while Arrows Puzzle Escape and Arrows GO! added more than 110 million installs quarter over quarter between them.

India shows why Android makes this trend particularly interesting. Arrow Puzzle, Arrows Puzzle Escape and Arrows GO! occupied the second, third and fourth spots in the country’s Q2 2026 game-download ranking. Sensor Tower says India supplied more than 11% of their global ad revenue across the markets it tracks, second only to the US.

That last detail matters because Google Play games do not live on in-app purchases alone. A puzzle title can turn huge Android scale into advertising revenue even when individual users spend little.

Gaming metric	Latest reported quarter
Overall mobile-game revenue growth	-4.5% YoY
Puzzle revenue	More than $4B
Puzzle revenue growth	+17% YoY
Strategy revenue	About $4.4B
Puzzle download growth	+1% YoY

Does the country matter as much as the app niche on Google Play?

Yes. On Google Play, choosing the right market can change revenue per install several times over, so a good niche in the wrong geography can still produce weak economics.

RevenueCat’s 2026 data puts median Day-60 revenue per install on Google Play at $0.26 in North America. In India and Southeast Asia, the figure is only $0.04. That is a 6.5-times difference.

Subscription prices reflect the same gap. Median Google Play pricing in India and Southeast Asia is about $3.12 per month and $14.64 per year, far below North American levels of $9.99 monthly and $39.99 annually.

Yet Android-heavy emerging markets should not be dismissed. India generated a record $345 million of mobile in-app spending in Q2 2026, up 35% from a year earlier. Non-game apps contributed almost $240 million, up more than 50%. Downloads passed 6.6 billion during the quarter.

The products winning there also look different. Generative AI and video entertainment are pushing spending higher, while short drama, commerce and local services pull in enormous audiences. Claude’s Indian mobile revenue, for example, increased more than nineteenfold year over year and made it the country’s second-highest-grossing generative-AI app.

Travel shows the other side of geography and intent. RevenueCat finds that Google Play Travel trials convert to paid at an exceptional 53%, yet the category produces weak post-launch revenue overall because usage tends to disappear after the trip.

There is no single “Android user.” A $40 annual health subscription aimed at the US and a cheap entertainment service built for millions of Indian users need completely different economics.

How much does a normal Google Play subscription app actually make?

Most new subscription apps make very little money, even while the overall Google Play market is growing.

RevenueCat’s 2026 dataset is sobering here. One year after launch, the median subscription app across stores generates only about $72 per month. Reaching $429 a month puts an app in the top quarter. Roughly $2,574 a month is already enough to enter the top 10%.

Only 17.3% of newly launched subscription apps reach $1,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years. Just 4.6% reach $10,000.

Competition is also exploding. Around 2,000 new subscription apps were launching each month in early 2022. That number has climbed above 14,700. Android launches grew from roughly 700 to 3,300 per month, while iOS grew even faster.

Meanwhile, apps released before 2020 still generate 69% of all subscription revenue in RevenueCat’s dataset. Apps launched in 2025 or later account for only about 3%.

This is probably the most useful reality check in the entire analysis. AI has made software cheaper to build, which has flooded the stores with more products. It has done much less to solve distribution.

The gap between winners and everyone else is actually widening. The top quartile of subscription apps grew recurring revenue by more than 80% year over year, while the bottom quartile shrank roughly 33%.

A good niche helps. It does not rescue an interchangeable app.

Which Google Play app niches are actually making money now?

The clearest Google Play money niches today are health and fitness, specialized AI products, creator tools, business utilities, personal finance, education and short-drama entertainment, while Puzzle stands out if we include games.

Generative AI has the most explosive growth. Spending is still doubling, ChatGPT is generating around $1.4 billion a quarter on mobile, and Claude, Gemini and Grok are growing rapidly. We would treat general AI assistants as an established winner rather than an easy opening, because the largest platforms already control most of the revenue. Applied AI looks more approachable.

Health and fitness has the cleanest subscription economics we found. Revenue is growing far faster than downloads, paid conversion leads RevenueCat’s category benchmarks, and products can be narrowed around nutrition, strength training, running, women’s health or another recurring goal. This is currently one of the strongest places to look for a paid consumer app.

Creator software also deserves to stay near the top. CapCut and Canva prove how large the market can become, while Photo & Video leads RevenueCat’s median post-launch revenue ranking. The interesting openings are increasingly specific workflows rather than generic image generation.

Business utilities and personal-finance apps are less glamorous and arguably more useful to study. VPNs can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars per week on Android, several budgeting apps simultaneously generate meaningful recurring revenue, and Business users have some of the better payer economics in subscription software. A narrow app that saves somebody time or money every week does not need to become culturally famous.

Education remains attractive where people want progress, structure and accountability. Chatbots have made generic information cheaper, so products tied to an exam, skill, profession or learning path have a stronger reason to survive.

Short drama is the newest category here that has clearly crossed into real scale. Roughly $750 million in quarterly spending and more than 850 million quarterly downloads make it impossible to call a fad now. The catch is that short drama needs content production and heavy user acquisition, so it suits a very different founder from a subscription utility.

Dating still makes a fortune, but network effects make those revenues difficult for a newcomer to attack. Puzzle gaming is growing against a shrinking mobile-games market, although success there depends heavily on advertising, user acquisition and live operations.

Looking across all of the evidence, we would put the most interesting smaller-developer opportunities today around a recurring problem with obvious monetary value: specialized health, AI-assisted creator workflows, profession-specific tools, focused personal finance and structured education.

The common thread is straightforward. Google Play users are currently paying for apps that repeatedly save time, improve an outcome, protect money or produce something useful. At the other extreme, entertainment apps can also make huge amounts when they capture enough attention. The awkward middle—apps with weak recurring value and no serious engagement loop—is where monetization becomes much harder.

That is why the highest-grossing category and the best niche to enter are often two different things. Tinder proves that dating makes money. ChatGPT proves that AI makes money. TikTok proves that social entertainment makes money. None of those facts makes cloning Tinder, ChatGPT or TikTok a sensible opportunity.

For a new Google Play business today, the stronger bet is usually narrower: find a group that already pays to solve a recurring problem, then build something materially better for that group.