App Store Statistics (2026): Downloads, Spending, Apps, and App Review

A platform decision can hinge on a number that looks straightforward: how big is the App Store? But “size” can mean consumer spending, downloads, live listings, developer accounts, or the submissions a store blocks before users see them. Those measures answer different questions.For 2025, the most useful cross-store baseline is $167 billion in in-app purchase revenue and nearly 150 billion downloads across iOS and Google Play. The platform splits point in opposite directions: iOS generated more reported consumer spending, while Google Play generated more downloads. The app catalog is less settled, because published counts depend on the source and its definitions.

App store statistics at a glance

• Combined consumer spending: Sensor Tower reports $167 billion in global in-app purchase revenue across iOS and Google Play during 2025, up 10.6% year over year. This is an app-intelligence estimate, rather than a platform financial disclosure. Sensor Tower’s 2026 State of Mobile is the underlying cross-store source.

• iOS consumer spending: Business of Apps reports $117.6 billion for the global iOS App Store in 2025, up 13.6% year over year, using Sensor Tower data. Apple App Store Statistics

• Google Play consumer spending: Business of Apps reports $49.2 billion globally in 2025, up 13% year over year, using Sensor Tower data. Google Play Store Statistics

• Combined downloads: nearly 150 billion downloads occurred across iOS and Google Play during 2025, up 0.8% year over year, according to Sensor Tower’s app-intelligence estimate.

• Apple ecosystem activity: an Apple-commissioned Analysis Group study says the App Store ecosystem facilitated more than $1.4 trillion in worldwide developer billings and sales in 2025. Its scope includes physical goods and services, digital goods and services, and in-app advertising. Apple’s ecosystem study announcement carries the full breakdown.

• Apple App Review: Apple reviewed 9,100,620 app submissions and rejected 2,093,244 in its 2025 reporting year. Apple’s 2025 App Store Transparency Report publishes both counts and rejection classifications.

• Google Play enforcement: UNVERIFIED: Google’s February 2026 security post reports preventing more than 1.75 million policy-violating apps from publication in 2025. Google’s security post requires independent confirmation before you use the figure as a settled benchmark.

• New Apple developers: Apple says it welcomed more than 306,000 new developers in

  2025. Apple’s 2025 fraud-prevention release reports that platform measure.

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Consumer spending and the wider App Store ecosystem

Sensor Tower’s $167 billion estimate covers global in-app purchases across iOS and Google Play for the full 2025 calendar year. It is the cleanest combined spending measure in this report because one data owner measures both storefronts.For the platform split, Business of Apps reports $117.6 billion in iOS consumer spending and $49.2 billion in Google Play consumer spending during 2025. Those figures total $166.8 billion. The approximately $0.2 billion difference from Sensor Tower’s $167 billion combined estimate is consistent with rounding in the published figures.Dividing the two platform figures produces an approximate 2.4:1 iOS-to-Google-Play spending ratio for 2025. This is a calculation from the published platform values, with the calculation shown so you can decide whether it fits your use case.Apple’s $1.4 trillion ecosystem figure belongs in a separate category. The 2025 study includes $1.1 trillion in physical goods and services, $149 billion in digital goods and services, and $151 billion in in-app advertising. Use it to describe commerce facilitated by Apple’s ecosystem; use the Sensor Tower-based figures when comparing app-store IAP spending.Apple also reports more than 850 million average weekly App Store users across 175 countries and regions in 2025. The metric describes average weekly users, which makes it useful for ecosystem reach rather than a direct comparison with downloads or registered developers.For a broader platform context, Quash’s iOS vs Android market-share and revenue statistics examines how the two operating systems differ in usage, revenue, and device reach.

App catalog counts and why they differ

Apple’s first-party transparency report lists 2,172,472 apps in its 2025 report. Business of Apps lists 2.42 million apps and games for the Apple App Store in 2025, based on Sensor Tower data. The figures describe similar catalogs at different reporting points and through different measurement systems.UNVERIFIED: 42matters lists 2,560,588 Apple App Store apps as of August 28, 2026. Its iOS catalog page has not been independently confirmed for this article. Keep that label attached if you cite the number.Google Play’s published counts spread further apart. Business of Apps lists 1.58 million apps in 2025. UNVERIFIED: AppBrain lists 1,970,522 apps as of August 2026, and UNVERIFIED: 42matters lists 2,545,651 apps as of August 28, 2026. The AppBrain count and 42matters Google Play count need independent confirmation before being treated as established facts.The range from 1.58 million to 2.545 million is roughly 61%, using the published values. Catalog counts can vary with the reporting window and with whether a tracker includes delisted, regional, removed, or previously observed listings. The trackers do not disclose enough comparable methodology to assign a confirmed cause to each difference.The practical rule is simple: pair every catalog figure with its date, source, and population. A catalog number without those details is too ambiguous for a platform comparison or market-sizing slide.

Downloads, publishers, and pricing models

Sensor Tower estimates nearly 150 billion downloads across both stores in 2025. Downloads measure acquisition events, so they are a useful demand signal but do not represent unique people or currently installed apps.Business of Apps reports 36.6 billion Apple App Store downloads in 2025: 9.1 billion games and 28.2 billion non-game apps. Its Google Play estimate is more than 100 billion downloads, comprising 36.2 billion games and 67.7 billion non-game apps. The platform figures align with the broader pattern: Google Play handles more download activity, while iOS records more reported consumer spending.Publisher counts need equally careful labels. Business of Apps describes Apple as having more than 800,000 active publishers in 2025 and Google Play as having more than one million publishers with published apps. “Active publishers” and “publishers with published apps” are different populations, so they should not be used as a clean head-to-head ranking.UNVERIFIED: 42matters lists 1,091,528 Apple publishers and 785,276 Google Play publishers as of August 28, 2026. Those listings have not been independently confirmed for this article. Apple’s transparency report separately lists 60,597,750 registered developers in 2025; that developer-program registration total is a different measure again.UNVERIFIED: 42matters also lists Apple’s catalog as 94.92% free and Google Play’s as 97.09% free on August 28, 2026. Treat those percentages as provisional until independently confirmed. They are a reminder that a free-versus-paid split needs the same source discipline as a spend figure.If you need to connect store scale with whether people keep an app after installing it, use these mobile app retention benchmarks alongside download data. Installs and retained users answer different product questions.

App review and store enforcement

Apple and Google publish valuable enforcement data, but the measures are not interchangeable. Apple reports submission reviews, including updates. Google’s cited release reports apps prevented from publication.

Apple’s published submission counts yield an approximate 23% rejection rate in 2025 (2,093,244 divided by 9,100,620). Apple publishes the components; the percentage is calculated from them.The largest Apple rejection classification was Performance, with 1,354,418 classifications in 2025. A single submission may receive more than one guideline classification, so this identifies the largest classification category rather than a count of uniquely rejected apps. Apple does not publish a root-cause split inside Performance.Apple says 90% of App Store submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours on average. Apple’s App Review documentation provides this current review-speed metric.Store review is only one checkpoint in release quality. A real-device mobile testing guide can help you plan coverage for the device, network, and operating-system conditions that an app may encounter before submission.

What is changing in app-store growth

Apple says more than 40 of the App Store’s top 100 apps featured consumer-facing AI capabilities in 2025, and that those apps saw stronger billing growth than other top-100 apps. Apple’s headline characterizes the difference as four times more billing growth, while its body uses the less-specific “stronger billing growth” description. The body wording is the safer claim to cite.Sensor Tower reports that non-game IAP revenue grew 21% year over year in 2025, compared with 1.3% for games, and that non-game apps surpassed games in IAP revenue for the first time. Together, these signals show why AI services and other non-game categories are increasingly important to storefront economics.Appfigures reports 557,000 new Apple App Store submissions in 2025, up 24% year over year. It describes 2016 as a peak of more than 1 million new apps, followed by 731,000 in 2017 and 474,000 in 2018. Appfigures’ submission analysis frames the 2025 result as a recovery in new releases rather than a return to the prior peak.

What the public record still cannot measure

Apple’s report makes Performance the largest rejection classification, yet it does not identify how many classifications stem from crashes, lifecycle timing, permission state, network transitions, layout defects, or broken links. Google’s public enforcement figure supplies no comparable root-cause taxonomy.No public dataset in this comparison connects store rejection or blocking outcomes to specific mobile QA failure classes across both storefronts. That gap matters when you are trying to link pre-submission testing investment to store outcomes.A useful cross-store dataset would state the failure category, store, number of submissions reviewed or blocked, sample definition, and observation period. Quash does not publish such a dataset today. Until a platform or testing provider does, claims about which QA failures drive the most store rejections remain unsupported.

Methodology and sources

This report separates platform disclosures, app-intelligence estimates, and calculations. Apple’s transparency and newsroom materials are first-party disclosures. Sensor Tower is used for its combined cross-store IAP and download estimates. Business of Apps is used for platform-level splits where it identifies Sensor Tower as the underlying data source.The approximate 2.4:1 spending ratio, $0.2 billion rounding difference, 61% catalog-count spread, and 23% Apple rejection rate are calculations from the values shown in the article. They are labeled as calculations rather than attributed to a source.Catalog and publisher measures are particularly definition-sensitive. The 42matters, AppBrain, and Google security-post figures remain explicitly marked UNVERIFIED because independent confirmation is required before they can support an established claim. Their inclusion shows the range readers will encounter, not a settled count.

Conclusion

Use app store statistics according to the decision in front of you. For a cross-store spending baseline, start with Sensor Tower’s 2025 IAP estimate; for a platform split, use the reported iOS and Google Play figures with their source and period. For catalog and publisher numbers, carry the definition and date with the number rather than treating any single count as final.If your question is release risk, the more revealing statistic is Apple’s Performance classification—and the gap behind it. Public data shows that performance issues are prominent in App Review, but it still cannot tell you which underlying QA failures are most likely to affect a store outcome. That is the measurement your next planning cycle should demand.