Mobile games account for almost 85% of app store revenue

The mobile apps market is a “superstar economy” dominated by a small number of companies – particularly those making freemium games – according to a new report published by research firm Midia Research. This will come as no surprise to developers struggling for attention on Google and Apple’s app stores, which both have more than 1m apps available, but the report provides more data outlining the challenge. Midia took a snapshot in May 2014 of the 50 top grossing apps on Apple’s App Store and Android’s Google Play store in the UK, US, Canada, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, then examined trends in the 700 apps it found – obviously, some will have appeared several times. The report notes that just 50 companies accounted for 81% of these top grossing apps across both stores. On Apple’s store, 105 companies accounted for the 350 top grossing apps, while on Google Play, 81 companies made up the list. Midia also found that games accounted for 84.9% of the 700 top grossing apps studied for the report, leaving other categories including social networking (4.1%), dating (3.9%) and navigation and travel (2.3%) in its wake. “The impact of games is doubly strong because no other genre of apps has learned how to make in-app payments work as effectively as games companies have,” write authors Mark Mulligan and Karol Severin. “The app economy is, for now at least, a games economy.”